The Genius Famine

Friday, 23 October 2015

(Note - this book is around 30,000 words in length - too long for online perusal - and any serious reader is advised to copy, paste, edit and print a paper copy version in order to read it effectively. On the other hand, there is a very cheap Kindle version avaiable to buy - and this may be a lot easier..)

The Genius Famine

Why we need geniuses, Why they’re dying out, and Why
we must rescue them

CIP catalogue record
for this book is available at the British Library

ISBN 9781908684608

Acknowledgements
– Both authors acknowledge the influence of Dr. Michael A. Woodley, both in
general terms and also in relation to several specific aspects of the argument
of this book; although we take full responsibility for the use we have made of
these ideas. In addition, Edward Dutton would like to thank Dr. Dimitri van der
Linden for assorted stimulating conversations on the topics in this book. He
would also like to thank his wife, Mimmi, and children Martha and Henry. Bruce
Charlton wishes to acknowledge the essential support and encouragement of his
wife, Gill; and his children, Billy and Nancy.

Contents

Introduction

1.What is the Endogenous personality?. 1

2.What is Personality, What is Intelligence?. 7

3.Different understandings of genius. 37

4.The Creative Triad. 45

5.What motivates the Genius Quest?. 51

6.Successful creativity. 59

7.Identifying the genius. 75

8.Destiny versus Conscientiousness. 91

9.The Shaman versus the Head Girl97

10.Newton versus Jung. 121

11.The evolution of genius. 129

12.The rise and fall of genius. 143

13.The neglect and suppression of genius. 173

14.The war on genius. 189

15.What to do. 203

16.In Search of the Boy Genius

. 211

Conclusion: Seven statements about genius

. 217

About the Authors. 219

Introduction

This book is about genius: what it
is, what it does, where it comes from.[1]

And about geniuses: especially why there used to be so many
and now there are so few; what was the effect of an era of geniuses, and what
will be the consequences of our current Genius Famine.

This book describes the genius as an Endogenous personality;
that is, a person of high intelligence combined with a personality driven from
within, an ‘inner’ –orientated personality: that is, a dominated by the
Creative Triad of (1) Innate high ability, (2) Inner motivation and (3)
Intuitive thinking.

When high intelligence and this type of personality are
confluent, a potential genius is the result. But to fulfil this potential the Endogenous
personality must find and accept his own Destiny, and must undergo the trials
and tribulations of a Quest before he is likely to be rewarded by an
Illumination: a breakthrough.

Even then, the breakthrough must be noticed, understood,
accepted, implemented by society at large; and we describe how past societies
were much better at recognizing and making a place for the potential genius.
Because the problem is that the Endogenous personality is usually an awkward
and asocial character at best; and often an actively unpleasant person and a
disruptive influence.

Geniuses are altruistic, in the sense that their work is
primarily for the good of the group; and not for the usual social rewards such
as status, money, sex, and popularity.

Therefore many geniuses need to be sustained in a long-term
way; and their work demands careful attention and evaluation.

We argue that modern societies, by means both indirect and
direct, have become hostile to genius and indifferent to the work of those
relatively few remaining geniuses.

However, because the work of a genius is necessary and
irreplaceable, we argue for a change of attitude. Modern society needs geniuses
for its own survival in the face of unfamiliar, often unprecedented, threats.
Therefore, we must in future do a better job of recognizing, sustaining and
accepting guidance from as many geniuses of the highest quality that can be found.

Chapter One

What is the
Endogenous Personality?

What is the Endogenous Personality?
And why is he so important?

In a nutshell, we argue that the Endogenous personality is
the type of a potential genius – a compound of abilities and attitudes, of
intelligence and innerness. As a strong generalization: the true geniuses are
Endogenous personalities; and it is from Endogenous personalities that geniuses
arise.

The Endogenous personality is the ‘inner’ Man; a person
whose outlook on life is ‘inward.’ He is inner-directed, inner-driven,
inner-motivated; one who uses inner modes of thinking, inner evaluations,
in-tuition; one who is to a high degree autonomous, self-sufficient; one who is
relatively indifferent to social pressures, influences and inducements.

He stands in stark contrast to the Exogenous personality;
that is, to most people. The Exogenous Personality is orientated toward the
environment, particularly the social environment. These are people who want
more than anything else social (including sexual) status, worldly success;
people whose perceptions are directed outwards and who try to align their
behaviour with group norms.

When described in such terms, the Endogenous personality
might appear anti-social, uncooperative, a dreamer, not the kind of person we
might wish to have to deal with on a regular basis. We would probably be
accurate in perceiving the Endogenous Personality in this negative way. We
probably wouldn’t want to go for a drink with him, let alone be friends with
him.

But he is important; he is very important. Because the
Endogenous personality is the archetypal ‘genius.’ He is the type of a genius – whether a large
scale, world historical genius of the highest level achieved by humanity – a
Shakespeare, a Beethoven or an Einstein – or a local, tribal, or town genius; a
shaman, a sculptor, an inventor whose name is unrecorded (yet who might be the
originator of some great but anonymous ballad, folk song, painting -- or a
technological breakthrough such as the spade, spear-thrower, arch or stirrup).

Genuine ‘breakthrough’, world-impact creativity is so rare,
so difficult (far more difficult than commonly imagined) that it requires a
special kind of mind – a mind especially designed for this kind of work (inner
work). There need not be many such men – indeed, there should not be too many,
since the necessary mind is relatively unfit for the primary, day-to-day,
activities of survival and reproduction of the species. But such men are needed
– sooner or later, from time to time.

These are the people who (whether we know their names or
not) will almost-certainly be behind the scientific and technical breakthroughs
that are the motor of civilization, these are people whose can inspire and
unite society moving it towards greater things or out of the depths of despair
and ennui; these are the people who
can rescue a society on the brink of catastrophe.

The Endogenous personality is recognized because when this
kind of creative personality is combined with high ‘general intelligence’, we
get a potential genius – of greatness in proportion to their ability.

So, an Inner, Intuitive personality plus high Intelligence
(or another special ability) is the Creative Triad and equals the Endogenous
personality, or potential genius. The high intelligence serves as a kind of
guarantee that the Endogenous personality is positively adapted by his lop-sided focus, and inclination to be a
creative specialist problem-solver in society; and is not merely a broken, sick
or damaged individual who simply cannot
participate in normal society – perhaps through mental or physical illness.

The Endogenous personality will stay focused on a problem
longer than most men – and he will look at the problem in a different way. He
will deploy different (more inward) procedures of understanding – more
detached, more abstracting. Hence he is more likely to see something new and
useful in a new and different way.

His stance is less personal. He stands back to a greater
extent than most. He sees the problem in a wider scope precisely because he
sees the problem detached from normal personal concerns, such as status, sex,
or wealth; none of which he really seems to care much about. For him, solving his
problem is not a means to an end – a way of gaining status, wealth or sex – it
is an end in itself. The inner man gets the greatest satisfaction from inner
work – it is what he most wants to do.

In this short book, we will explore the Genius; the
Endogenous type of personality including its exceptionally high intelligence.
We will argue that the highly able Endogenous personality is indeed the
archetypal genius; the engine, in particular, of the original innovations that
are vital to civilization itself. Without genius, civilization will certainly
continue to decline (and we will show that it is declining), and eventually collapse. With more geniuses, taken
notice of, the process would be slowed and – who knows? – perhaps some genius
could discover a way out?

We will demonstrate, in more depth, the import-ance to any
society of nurturing a small number of such personalities; and, worryingly, we
will find that they are less likely to manifest themselves now than was the
case just a few generations ago.

We will argue, indeed, that we have a Genius Famine. Genius
has now all-but disappeared from public view; partly because intelligence
(which is strongly genetic) is in decline in the West, partly because social
institutions no longer recognize or nurture genius, and partly because the
modern West is actively hostile to genius.

Finally, we will look at what – if anything – can be done to
rescue the genius and thus preserve civilization.

However, in order to understand the Endogenous Personality,
we need to understand the nature of personality itself, as well as the nature
of intelligence, as these two traits are at the heart of the Endogenous personality
and of Genius.

Chapter Two

What is
Personality, What is Intelligence?

Intelligence and Personality are the
two main ways that psychologists have developed for describing differences
between people.

In brief – Intelligence is an ability, while personality is
character; intelligence is general – with the level of intelligence affecting
many specific abilities, while personality can be understood as a pattern of
motivations, preferences, satisfactions.

In terms of computers – intelligence is something like the
processing speed, while personality is about the types of software installed.
Or, intelligence is about the efficiency of the brain, while personality is
about what that brain is designed to do. Or intelligence is about how well the
brain works; while personality describes the circuitry, the hard-wiring – what kind of brain it is.

A further difference is that intelligence is measured by
tests – IQ tests; while personality is evaluated by human beings – either
self-rated using self-describing scales, or else rated by other people.

But a similarity is that both IQ and personality are (nearly
always) comparative measurements. A person high in intelligence, or high on a
personality trait such as Conscientiousness, is ‘high’ relative to other people. ‘High’ or ‘Low’, in both intelligence and
personality, therefore does not
describe an objective measurement of a personal attribute in the way that (for
example) high or low blood pressure or blood sugar measurements would.

Personality

Personality is, in essence, our
general way of being. Differences in personality predict differences in how
people will respond in a certain situation.

Personality evaluations are usually measured by
questionnaires: How close to you does a car moving at a certain speed have to
be before you judge that it is too dangerous to cross the road in front of it?
How many annoying things have to happen to you in a day before you lose your
temper and raise your voice? How strongly do the emotions of others impact how
you feel?

Different people will give different answers to these
questions, in part because of variation in their personality. Typically, people
are asked whether a certain behaviour, or like or dislike, is present or absent
in them; or else asked to rate its strength. Multiple such questions can be
analysed and averaged to yield a few personality ‘traits’ which cluster
together.

The exact number of these traits used by psychologists
depends on the purpose of the personality evaluation. The number can be as few
as one general master trait (e.g. pro-social versus asocial – see below), or dozens of specific traits such as
aggression, or courage – but usually, for convenience, the number of traits
used for describing personality have been something between about two and five.

Although we will be suggesting revisions and improvements to
the scheme, many psychologists currently suggest that personality can best be
understood in terms of five essential personality characteristics: these are
the ‘Big 5’, which each make a scale between extremes separated by a dash:

(3) Conscientiousness--Impulsiveness:
Conscientiousness refers to responsivity to social norms, usually leading to
organized and self-disciplined behaviour.

(4) Agreeableness
(which is essentially the same as the Empathizing trait)--Indifference to other
people: Agreeableness shows itself in a high interest in other people, what
they are thinking and how they feel.

(5) Openness-Intellect--Aversion
to change/ intellectual conservatism: Openness references intellectual
curiosity and a preference for novelty, creativity (in some sense of the word),
hypnotisability, unusual psychological experiences. Openness weakly but
significantly correlates with intelligence, as it is measuring some of the same
things.

These five personality traits are (except for Openness--Intellect)
regarded as independent of IQ scores (at least within normal IQ ranges); and
our placing on them predicts how we behave.

For example, high Conscientiousness as a child predicts
greater success in education and employment; high Neuroticism predicts problems
with mood swings, anxiety and depression. High Openness-Intellect will tend to result
in being a novelty-loving, impractical, perhaps artistic, academic or spiritual
dreamer. A moderately high score, however, is a predictor of artistic success –
or at least, on some measures of artistic success that focus on the production
of novelty (although, we will argue, High Openness does not predict the genius
type of creativity).[2]

The Big Five were developed from the Big Three traits
defined by psychologist Hans J. Eysenck (1916-1997), who arrived in England
from Germany in the 1930s and became the most dominant personality in British
academic psychology. The Big Three are Extraversion, Neuroticism and Psychoticism.[3]
In effect, the Big Five dimensions of Conscientiousness and Agree-ableness are
the opposites of various aspects of Eysenck’s Psychoticism; and Openness takes
some aspects of Psychoticism and blends them with behaviours characteristic of
modern intellectuals (as may be inferred from this description, we regard the Openness
trait as a concept of dubious biological validity).

Like Eysenck, the British-born Canadian psychologist J.
Philippe Rushton (1943-2012) was an original thinker, unafraid to tackle
controversial ideas.[4] Rushton
showed that the Big Five (and Big Three) are all co-correlated, and could all
therefore be collapsed into a single personality variable, which he called the
General Factor Personality (GFP).[5] GFP
can be conceptualized as the single dimension of personality – from pro-social
to a-social – which underlies the more specific person-ality traits –
analogously to how general intelligence or ‘g’ underlies all the specific
cognitive abilities, something which we explore below

So General Factor of Personality can be conceptualized as
the degree to which a personality is prosocial–
in other words, the degree to which someone has the kind of personality type
and behaviours that underpin many socially desirable traits, the degree to
which someone approximates to the type of person that makes for friendliness,
helpfulness, being a ‘good neighbour’; for peaceful, orderly, cooperative,
hard-working, placid citizens.

GFP describes a basic personality dimension, high levels of
which (it is suggested) evolved as an adaptation in complex and stable
societies so that people would ‘get along together’. So a person with high GFP
would be sociably extraverted, be empathic and concerned with the feelings of
others, conscientious and self-disciplined in pursuit of socially-approved
goals, have stable emotions, and be open to new ideas.

Marvellous as the high GFP person sounds, throughout this
book we argue that a personality of almost the opposite type is necessary for the
true genius (not the only thing required, but necessary) – we call this the
Endogenous personality, and this new concept will soon be described in detail.

But in summary, the Endogenous personality, necessary for
genius, is self-sufficient, indifferent to the opinions of others or normal
social aims, being instead wrapped-up in his own personal goals, and making
judgements using his own internal, subjective evaluation systems – he will work
very hard and for long periods on his own projects, but will not willingly
go-along with other people’s plans and schemes. But more on this later…

Personality traits, depending on how they are measured, have
been shown to be in the region of 50% to around 70% heritable, based mainly on
twin and adoption studies.[6] (Heritability
is a measure of how closely parents resemble their children in a group study –
the number refers to how closely the parents’ personalities predict the child’s
– heritability of one would mean that children’s personalities were wholly a
product of their parents’ personalities; zero would mean the mathematical
relationship between parent and offspring’s personalities was random.)

Since the heritability of personality is less than one, some
combination of chance and the environment does affect the kind of personality
which you develop, but only within certain genetic limits. An unstable,
dangerous childhood will tend to increase mental instability, and those who
experience it will learn to see the world as a dangerous place – and this may
have a lasting effect on their behaviour (this calibration of adult behaviour
to childhood environment is the subject of Life History studies in biology –
humans as well as animals).[7]

For instance, when childhood is unpredictable and dangerous,
children will tend to be calibrated to ‘live for the now,’ so displaying lower
Conscientiousness, and they may be suspicious of other people, leading to lower
Agreeableness.

Another example is that girls who have grown up in
sexually-unstable situations seem to adopt a short-termist sexual strategy,
having children with a variety of men who are chosen for their dominance (hence
probably good genes) rather than their ability to remain committed to a
relationship and provide resources over the long term. In slang terms, girls from
unstable homes may exhibit a preference for ‘cads’ rather than ‘Dads’.[8]

Intelligence

So much for personality, what then
is intelligence?

‘Intelligence’ can be seen as the ability to think
abstractly and to learn quickly – this leads to an ability to solve problems
quickly, but only when those problems have previously been encountered. In
problem solving, intelligence provides fast processing and a larger knowledge
base, but intelligence is not about
being original or creative.

In general, therefore, high intelligence predicts desirable
outcomes – however there is one important exception: high intelligence, in
modern societies, predicts lower fertility – especially among women. Thus, in
modern societies (with access to birth control) the most intelligent women
average less than one child, because so many intelligent women have zero
children, and very few have large families.[12]

Some people argue for a broader or multiple definition of
intelligence, including ‘emotional intelligence’ for example. But there is, in
general, no need to separate this from ‘intelligence’ as we define it. The
ability to solve social problems has been shown to be predicted by
intelligence; and all cognitive aptitudes always co-correlate in rigorous group
studies, even though individuals (including geniuses) may show significantly
divergent specific cognitive strengths and weaknesses.[13]

Intelligence is measured by IQ tests. These typically
measure three forms of intelligence: verbal, numerical (mathematical) and
spatial (geometric). Some individual people are higher in one form of
intelligence than another, and rarely they may have above average measures in
one measure of intelligence and below average in another – but, overall, in
group studies all of the many different measures of cognitive ability
(vocabulary, general knowledge, reading ability, puzzle solving, algebra,
what-comes-next sequences of numbers or of symbols etc.) will always positively
correlate. It is consistently found that, within-groups and between-groups,
high ability in one task goes with high ability in other tasks, and vice versa.

This is why intelligence is called ‘general’, and why it can
be compared with processing speed in a computer – a ‘faster’ processing
computer is better at doing almost every kind of task – all the types of software (graphics, statistics, word processing
etc.) will run more efficiently. And not only does a fast computer complete
tasks more quickly, but a fast computer can also do things that are – in
practice – impossible for a slower computer (which will be unable to cope with
the load and sequence of computations, and will ‘seize-up’.).

The positive correlation between cognitive measures means
that we can talk about a ‘general factor’ that underpins all of them. The IQ is
a statistical construct which measures an inferred ability which underlies all
of these cognitive abilities. This underlying ability is known as ‘g’ for ‘general
intelligence.’

Intelligence increases throughout childhood and decreases
from middle age onwards (probably from early adulthood, but slowly) and, as
such, IQ is usually a comparative measure – comparing the individual with a
group sample of the same age. The IQ number is a way of expressing the
individual’s position in a rank ordering of IQ test scores for his age group;
hence the term ‘intelligence quotient’ (IQ) (the average IQ is called 100,
often calibrated against the UK population average), larger numbers are above
average intelligence and lower numbers are below average (expressing this in
percentage terms based on a normal distribution curve with a standard deviation
of (usually) 15 IQ points – for instance an IQ above 120 is approximately in
the top ten per cent of the population; and 130 in the top two per cent).

It is very important to recognise that IQ is therefore a
comparative measure – and this limits its usefulness – because intelligence in
a person or group is being measured only relative
to another person or group.

The results of IQ tests strongly correlate with intuitive
measures of thinking ability (such as school work) and they are not merely
culturally influenced (although, naturally, culture and familiarity do have
some influence). We know that IQ testing is valid and robust across cultures,
because the cultures (or sub-cultures) that do badly in IQ tests do the
least-badly on the most culturally-biased parts of the test, and also because
the IQ test results correlate positively with something objective – that is,
with differences in simple reaction times.[14] The
correlation between intelligence and reaction times means that intelligence is
a good indicator of how well the nervous system is running.

As already noted, intelligence is a vital predictor of life
outcomes. Approximately 70% of the variance in school performance is explained
by differences in intelligence, 50% of the variance among university
undergraduate performance and 40% of the variance in postgraduate performance.
Intelligence explains about 30% of the variance in salary and is a clear
predictor of job status.[15]

It has been found that less-selective professionals, like
teachers and nurses, have an IQ of about 110, while it is 120 for doctors and
lawyers, and even higher for those who rise to the top of these professions.[16]
Within academia, the average PhD student in education has an IQ of around 117,
while the average PhD student in Physics has an IQ of 130.[17]

As with personality, intelligence is strongly heritable –
indeed the heritability measures are higher for intelligence than personality,
perhaps because IQ is a more precise and valid measure than are personality
ratings. Around 80% of the variance in intelligence is probably genetic – over-whelmingly,
therefore, intelligence is inherited from parents.[18]

Environmental factors include sufficient nutrition and a
sufficiently intellectually stimulating environment when growing up. Just as
important is an intellectually stimulating adult environment, which those with
high intelligence will tend to create for themselves. For this reason, among
others, the genetic component of IQ during childhood is relatively low, as the
child’s environment will reflect its parents’ intelligence. Only as the child
reaches adulthood will its environment reflect its own intelligence, leading to
a genetic component of 80%.[19]

High intelligence is a sign of having an overall-efficient,
fast-processing brain – requiring (as American psychologist Geoffrey Miller has
pointed-out) ‘good genes’; which mostly means a minimal load of deleterious
mutations.[20]

Deleterious genetic mutations occur spontaneously in every
generation – due to any cause of mutation (radiation, chemical, heat etc.) or
from DNA copying errors – and some non-lethal but potentially-damaging mutated
genes are usually inherited from parents. Nearly all chance gene mutations are
harmful – and only very rarely are they ‘adaptive’ and improving of function
(but it is these very rare beneficial mutations that are the basis of evolution
by natural selection).[21]

In general, however, spontaneous mutations reduce ‘fitness’
(i.e. reduce reproductive potential, by damaging heritable genetic quality) and
the human species has needed to prevent mutations from accumulating every
generation as inherited mutations are added-to by new mutations. Somehow, these
mutations need to be continually removed from the human population, or else
they would overwhelm and destroy the species in a process termed Mutational Meltdown.
Thus, following Miller, we would expect the more intelligent to have bodies –
and especially nervous systems – that function particularly well and especially
in certain specific respects. For example, a high functioning nervous system
has been shown to be associated with a more efficient and stronger immune
response.[22]

The difference between intelligence and IQ

The difference between intelligence and IQ is that
intelligence is the real, underlying psychological function, whereas IQ is a
score achieved in a test – a score which is intended to compare and measure
intelligence but which is an indirect, only partly-precise and only
partly-valid measure of intelligence. The IQ test is clearly a sound measure of
intelligence – because IQ scores correlate with other measures of cognitive
problem solving ability and thus brain functioning – but it is imperfect,
meaning other factors than intelligence can impact the score. In much the same
way, a bathroom scales measures weight – its results correlate with other
measures of weight – but some scales are better than others and no scales is
perfect.

Therefore, we can think of a qualitative, subjective
understanding of the phenomenon of real intelligenceas an irreducible entity – not understood in terms of other things
nor only in terms of what it does,
but in terms of itself as a real thing
which we can detect and measure only indirectly. And we can then conceptualize
IQ as the practical, simplified, publicly-shareable way of conceptualizing and
investigating intelligence.

IQ can be, and usually is, researched in a ‘theory-free’ fashion,
with operational definitions based on proxy description, measurement by
comparison, and correlation – indeed intelligence is sometimes asserted to be
nothing-more than a mathematical-derivation from IQ scores.

But we would emphasize that to understand intelligence
requires understanding that sometimes a person may be of high intelligence and nothave
a similarly high IQ score (in other words, their IQ score is under-estimating
their intelligence) – and that this may be the case no matter how validly, how often
and how carefully the IQ is measured and calculated. And another person may
have high IQ scores, measured in the best ways and by the best methods, yetnotbe of
similarly high intelligence (in other words, their IQ score is over-estimating their intelligence).

Highly intelligent people who donotscore as highly on IQ tests are
easy to understand – because anything which reduces test performance could lead
to this outcome: illness, pain, impaired consciousness and impaired
concentration from sleepiness, drugs, drug-withdrawal, mental illness ... there
are multiple causes, and some are chronic (long-lasting, perhaps life-long).

And people with high IQ scores who arenotof similarly high intelligence to
their scores are familiar to anyone who has attended a highly-selective college
or educational programme or who are members of intellectually ‘elite’
professions; since they typically make-up a large proportion of participants.
The ‘Flynn Effect,’ named after its discoverer New Zealand psychologist James
Flynn, refers to the phenomenon of rising average IQ scores over the twentieth
century in Western countries. The fact that this has taken place in a context
of declining average real-intelligence means that the Flynn Effect can indeed
be understood as evidence that IQ tests measure issues other than just
intelligence, meaning they are imperfect.

(Plus, even the most reliable IQ test only has a
reliability of about 0.9 when retesting the same person.)

One possible explanation for the Flynn Effect, proposed by
Flynn himself, is that modern society – due to higher levels of education in
the general population – makes us think in a more scientific way and this
ability is partially a reflection of intelligence and partially of a separate
ability that does not rely on intelligence.[23] As such, IQ tests can be used to compare intelligence
within a current population but they cannot be used as easily to make
comparisons over time because they are examinations and people will tend to get
better at them by practicing them and thinking in the way that permits optimum
performance in them as society becomes more educated. So, up to a point, IQ
scores may increase over time, despite the fact that intelligence is
decreasing.

After (probably) six or eight generations of rising average
IQ scores and falling real-general intelligence; there has been a progressive
breakdown in the strength of correlation between intelligence measured in terms
of IQ scores, and intelligence understood as a real underlying, brain
functional phenomenon. Indeed, it seems likely that many or most people among modern
high IQ scorers do not have similarly
high real-intelligence. This would be expected to apply especially at
highly-educationally-selective institutions where Endogenous personalities are
substantially selected-out by the decades-long trend for an increasingly-high
minimum-threshold of conscientiousness imposed by educational qualifications.

The correlation between IQ score and ‘g’ was probably much higher
in the past (a century plus ago) than it is now – meaning that the distinction
between IQ score and real, underlying intelligence is more important now than
it used to be.

The evolution of higher intelligence

Geoffrey Miller’s emphasis on
intelligence (he emphasizes particularly ‘creative’ intelligence) providing a ‘fitness
measure’ which one person can evaluate in another; and his noting that relative
IQ provides a quantitative correlate of deleterious mutations – is worth
pausing over and amplifying.

This implies that high IQ serves as a kind-of guarantee and
advertisement of ‘good genes’ – and this is why high intelligence is regarded
as attractive, and therefore why men and women of higher intelligence tend to
pair-up in marriage in much the same way that good-looking men and women tend
to pair-up (this system of like pairing with like is termed ‘assortative
mating’).

We have already noted that intelligence correlates with fast
reaction times. This strongly implies that ‘intelligence’ is simply the
function of a brain that is working well, just as strength is the function of
muscle that is working well. The human body has evolved to work optimally well
in a particular environment and the same is true of the human brain. Detailed historical
research by British economist Gregory Clark has shown that until the Industrial
Revolution a form of natural selection was operating in Western societies.
Those who were not physically strong, who did not have strong immune systems,
who were of low intelligence and unable to work steadily for long hours would
usually either die as children or be unable to raise children of their own; and
would thus be unable to pass on their deleterious genes.[24]

In other words, until about 1800 only the minority of people
with (on average) the ‘best genes’ (i.e. the lowest mutation load) would be
able to survive and reproduce; and among the great majority of the population
only a very small proportion of their offspring (averaging much less than two,
probably less than one, per woman) would survive to a healthy adulthood,
reproduce and raise children of their own. In this context, which was for
almost all of human history until about two hundred years ago; both new and
inherited deleterious mutations were filtered-out, or purged, from the population every generation by this very harsh
form of natural selection.

In much the same way, the number of surviving offspring was
predicted by socioeconomic status – and especially by intelligence – in
pre-Industrial Europe. Clark shows that in seventeenth century England, for
example, the richer 50% of those who left wills had 40% higher completed
fertility (children of their own, still alive when they passed away) than did
the poorer 50%. In essence, the English intellectual middle classes (e.g.
senior clerks, merchants, lawyers, churchmen, physicians etc.) and upper class
seem to have been the most successful at reproducing for several hundred years
– providing the majority of viable children with each generation so that over
many generations their descendants (inheriting their ancestors’ high
intelligence) expanded as a proportion to become almost all of the English
population.

Those with the lowest levels of deleterious mutations would,
for that reason, have high
intelligence and a high functioning immune system. As such, they would attain
or maintain high socioeconomic status, and, in a context of limited medicine,
their offspring would be more likely to survive. In addition, genes for
intelligence would permit them to become wealthier, meaning they could better
protect themselves, and their offspring, from disease, poor living conditions
and accidents; and they could afford to have large numbers of children
(ensuring at least some survived), without risking starvation. These two related
processes would ensure that the children of the richer survived better.

The message seems to be that in pre-industrial Europe
(before about 1800-1850) natural selection on humans operated mostly via
mortality rates – especially child mortality rates. An average of more than
half of children would die before adulthood, but this consisted of near total
mortality rates among the children of the poor, and ill, and of low
intelligence or ‘feckless’ personality; whereas among the skilled middle
classes (clerks, merchants, lawyers, doctors etc.) the mortality rates were
lower and fertility (number of births) was high. Therefore in each generation
most of the children came from the most intelligent group in the population,
and over several generations almost all the population would have been children
whose ancestors were the most intelligent (also conscientious, and relatively
peaceful) sector of the population.

(This is why anyone English who has ever traced their family
tree will find that by the sixteenth century – when records begin – their
ancestors are, at the very least, wealthy though non-aristocratic farmers
(‘yeomen’ or richer ‘husbandmen’).[25] And
this is why every English person alive is descended from King Edward III –
1312-1377.).[26]

Clark argues that this harsh natural selection resulted in
an increase of average intelligence with every generation, and ultimately
culminated in the intellectual and social breakthroughs of the Industrial
Revolution. It meant that there was a large percentage of the society whose
intelligence was so high that the necessary breakthroughs could be made, and that
the society as a whole was sufficiently intelligent such that it could maintain
and even develop these breakthroughs. Furthermore, the workforce developed a personality
type which was pre-adapted (by preceding Medieval natural selection, operating
over several hundred years) to the needs of large scale industry and complex
social organization.

The ending of selection for higher intelligence

This ‘eugenic’ (i.e. genetic-quality,
or ‘fitness’-increasing) environment rapidly stopped in the wake of the Industrial
Revolution, and soon went into reverse; with socioeconomic status becoming negatively associated with fertility,
especially among women. In other words, after the Industrial Revolution the
direction of natural selection turned upside-down, with higher social status,
wealth and education leading to lower reproductive success.

This process – known as dysgenics (i.e. selection that is
reducing ‘fitness’ – in the sense of heritable genetic quality, where
deleterious mutat-ions are taken as an index of low heritable quality hence
fitness) – has been documented by British psychologist Richard Lynn. In
addition, Lynn notes that the pattern of reproduction ceased to eliminate genes
that would lead to a poor immune system or various physical impairments. Modern
medicine means that genetically-damaged people can procreate leading to a
dysgenic impact on health, more deleterious genes and thus a further negative
impact on intelligence.[27]

Probably the most significant impact of the Industrial Revolution
was in reducing child mortality rates from more than half to (eventually) just
about one per cent. For the first time in history, almost all the population,
including the poorest classes and those with the heaviest mutation loads, were
leaving behind more than two surviving children. Over a few generations, the
mutational load must have accumulated – fitness must have declined – and
average intelligence must have reduced due to the effects of deleterious
mutations on brain development and functioning.

Since intelligence is correlated with genetic quality, this
inferred population level mutation accumulation implies that average
intelligence should have declined since the Industrial Revolution.

The inferred decline in general intelligence due to both mutation
accumulation plus ‘dysgenic’ patterns of fertility, can be measured using
simple reaction times, which correlate with ‘g’ – and it has been found that reaction
times have slowed considerably since the late 1800s when reaction times
measurements were first performed.

We will return to discuss this matter further – but so far
it seems that intelligence first increased due to natural selection in the
Medieval era; then has declined due to the changes in natural selection at the
time of the Industrial Revolution.

So, what about personality – how was personality affected by
natural selection on the European population, first in the Medieval era, then
through the Industrial Revolution?

In sum, it seems that Medieval Europe was a breeding ground
for high intelligence – which is one component of genius; but also a breeding
ground for pro-social extraverted people of stable ‘high GFP’ personality type,
high in conscientiousness, empathic; obedient, good at working regular hours
and getting along with their neighbours.

However, although high intelligence is a component of
genius, and although an average pro-social personality type is useful, and
perhaps essential, for successful industrial societies; the high GFP/
pro-social personality is almost the opposite
of that required to make a genius. And yet, late Medieval and Renaissance
Europe was a veritable hotbed of genius, and it was these geniuses who enabled
and triggered the Industrial Revolution.

So, how can the average population increase in pro-social
personality, yet that same population generate individuals of exceptionally
high intelligence who have the ‘asocial’ Endogenous personality type, some of
whom made major breakthroughs and became recognized as geniuses?

Two ways of being highly intelligent; Good genes or the Endogenous
personality

Most people would probably say that an
Endogenous personality was a matter of sheer chance – that in a population
characterized by high GFP, a few individuals just happened (by random
variation) to have low GFP – and this low GFP/ Endogenous personality group
included some individuals of very high intelligence who were the potential
geniuses.

But our suggestion is different: picking-up on a suggestion
from British psychologist Michael A. Woodley, we suggest that the high rate of
European genius was not an accident. We will argue that the Medieval European
population was under group selection as well as individual natural selection –
and specifically that it was group selection which led to the evolution of
geniuses.

In a nutshell, the Endogenous personality evolved in a high
intelligence population to provide a significant minority of geniuses, whose
function was to be specialists in creative problem solving and invention. The
activities of this minority of geniuses had disproportionate impact, and were
of general benefit to the survival and /or expansion of the social group among
whom the geniuses lived and worked.

Indeed, we would argue that there are two ways of being
exceptionally intelligent. The usual way is that someone in a population is exceptionally
intelligent is by what is termed Good Genes: that is, having few genetic faults
or errors – the person has a structurally normal brain, but with nothing (or nothing
much) wrong with it. In other words he has a low load of deleterious mutations
(or, conversely, he isnotsuffering from mutation
accumulation).

But there is another way – which is by having an Endogenous
personality – which means that his brain is purposely designed (by group selection – the mechanisms of which are
currently poorly understood) to be creative, to make breakthroughs. Such a
person is, in sum, a genius (albeit very probablynota
world historical genius; but a tribal or local genius).

Our assumption is that in the potential genius – and if we
could measure it, which is not possible at present – we would see a brainwired-up
to be intelligent and not merely intelligent, but also wired-up to be more
orientated towards internal processing – more intuitively creative, more
internally-motivated.

Therefore the brain of an Endogenous personality is an evolutionarily specialized brain; which has
high intelligence not so much negatively from lack of mutations; as positively
– because it is a brain ‘designed’ (by natural selection) to be highly
efficient for the purpose of creative discovery.

And this is why the genius has a special (Endogenous)
personality. Usually personality and intelligence are almost distinct and
little-correlated; but the brain of a genius is differently wired from a normal
brain: it is a specialized and purposive brain, a lop-sided brain, a brain in
which some circuits usually used for social intelligence and reproductive
success are co-opted to serving a creative purpose.

In sum, the brain of a
genius is one that is specialized for creative discovery and both high
intelligence and an ‘inner-oriented’ personality are features of this
specialization. This is why personality and intelligence go together in the
genius, whereas in ‘normal people’ personality and genius can vary almost
independently and there is little correlation between the two.

We have discussed, then, the concepts of personality and
intelligence and the factors that lead to differences in them. We will now
attempt to understand how these relate to genius.

Chapter Three

Different
understandings of Genius

What is the nature of ‘genius’?
There are many layers to genius – although typically only those nearest the
surface are considered. Some of the main layers are:

1. Sociological: Impact on history

2. Biological–differential:
Reproductive Success

3. Biological–ideal: Fitness

4. Philosophical–Theological: Fitness
for what? Ultimate Purpose?

Let us consider each in turn.

1.
Sociological – this is the usual level of analysis, the usual definition of
a genius. A genius is seen as a person who has made a disproportionately large
impact on human history. This can be measured more-or-less objectively by
evaluating the consensus of expert historians of science, technology, arts,
literature etc. – since these experts exhibit a high level of agreement
concerning what is most important.

While this is, broadly, the interpretation we use in this
book with which to frame genius – the sociological category is over inclusive,
since individuals may have a large impact on human history despite a
non-exceptional, non-genius personality or mediocre ability; as examples due to
accident of birth (e.g. some monarchs), accidents of public response (the ‘famous
for being famous’ phenomenon), being married to a major figure and thereby
having power and influence bestowed for that reason; or simply from the luck,
or misfortune, of being in the right place at the right time.

2.Biological – Differential. A genius
is seen in biological terms as one who makes a disproportionately large impact
on human reproduction. This is measured in terms of reproductive success, which
is measured in terms of the number of descendants of a genius and/or the group
to which he belongs to – or, in the relevant case of group selection,
biological success is measured in terms of the survival and expansion of the
social group to which the genius belongs.

By this measure, a genius is one who causes a measurable
increase in the numbers or proportion of his society (by some measure) –
examples of such geniuses would be those who created the technical
breakthroughs leading to the Agrarian and Industrial Revolutions – for example
Robert Bakewell (1725-95) the animal breeder, Coke of Norfolk (Thomas Coke,
Earl of Leicester, 1754-1842) the deviser of more efficient farming methods; or
Richard Trevithick (1771-1833) the inventor of the high pressure steam engine.

And an ‘anti-genius’ would be one who did the opposite:
caused a decline in the number or proportion of descendants or group members.
Candidates would include Napoleon, whose policies and wars seem to have caused
a collapse in the French population relative to the British one.[28]

3.
Biological – Ideal. This takes account of the objective, not differential,
effect of ‘fitness’ (here defined in terms of heritable genetic quality) by
estimating organismal functionality – the reproductive potential of an average
organism is a given environment.

For example, a lineage may increase in its numbers or
proportion of the population; even though there is an accumulation of
deleterious mutations which damage basic functionality. We would argue that
this was happening in Europe among the lower classes during the 19th
century. One effect of the Industrial Revolution, in Gregory Clark’s work, was
that the lower classes increased both numerically and as a proportion of the
European population (due to maintaining high fertility as child mortality rates
declined) – however, we argue that despite this ‘success’ the underlying
fitness/genetic quality of the lower classes was actually declining, due to
mutation accumulation.

So reproductive success (absolute or relative) can increase
even as the underlying functionality or fitness declines. This can happen when
the environment is less harsh, inflicts a lower mortality rate – as with
animals in a zoo, or humans in modern society. This would be seen if the
experiment was done of returning an animal, or human, to its ‘wild’ or original
environment – when the capacity of the organism (or species) to survive and
reproduce will be seen to have declined.

We assume that this has happened to modern Man in general
and everywhere since the Industrial Revolution: i.e. his ‘ideal’ fitness has
declined; and this would be seen if or when modern Man had to return to
pre-1800 conditions, for example if the Industrial Revolution unravelled and
the world returned to a Medieval type agrarian society.

If or when this happens, we would predict that the human population
would collapse to numbers significantly below
1800 levels, and would stay low for several or many generations – simply
because Men would be less fit, less well adapted (their adaptations having been
destroyed by mutation accumulation). But this fitness decline is presently
obscured by the ‘softness’ and abundance of modern life, which is itself a
product of breakthroughs by geniuses of the past.

Thus there is a lag between the onset of mutation
accumulation and the effects working their way through the population. And the inertial
benefit of past geniuses continues to produce a comfortable and low-mortality
environment Man for some generations after genius has itself dwindled.

4.Philosophical – Theological – Fitness
for what?

If an ideal, not actual, concept of fitness is to be used,
then it is not clear what the environment against which fitness or functionality
should be measured is. This creates a need for, opens space for, a
philosophical discourse about what Man’s fitness ought to be.

By this account, a genius is one who enhances his group’s
fitness for (or functionality-in) the kind of environment which Man is aiming-for, or wants to have. One
version of this would be a genius tending to create Men fitted for utopia. Such
a definition would include philosophers in the broad sense of the word;
artists, painters, poets, literary authors etc. – from Plato to Hegel and
beyond.

In ultimate terms, the deepest understanding of genius is
perhaps one who promotes the ultimate purpose of Life-itself, in terms of the
divine plan or ultimate purpose of life. This definition would include
religious founders, prophets, saints, holy men and women; and also some
artists, poets, and thinkers.

Overall, it can be seen that these four definitions of
genius dissociate. For example, a genius who promotes theological ultimate
purpose may damage reproductive success (if a good new religious group is
exterminated). A genius who promotes reproductive success may damage ideal
fitness (i.e. the population increases but so does the deleterious mutation
load).

In this book, we will understand ‘genius’ primarily in the
sociological sense: that is, a world-historical genius is seen as a person who
has made a disproportionately large impact on human history – but we will restrict
the definition of genius to a specific psychological group within this
category: thus, our concept of a genius is one who has the Endogenous
personality and who, because of this,
has made a disproportionate impact on human society and history.

Furthermore, we consider the potential genius to be someone who has the Endogenous personality
but has not, or not yet, made a large impact; and geniuses may also be
classified by the scale and depth of their impact – some with an impact that is
international and permanent, some with a local and more temporary impact.

And, of course, the personal identity of a genius may or may
not be known; or may be lost to history – so we know the identity of
Shakespeare who wrote the Sonnets; but the names of those geniuses who wrote
the Border Ballads (coming from the Border of England and Scotland in the late
Medieval era, and later recorded from oral tradition by the likes of the great
novelist and poet Sir Walter Scott – 1771-1832) are all lost, and perhaps never
were known.[29]

This, of course, means that, from a particular vantage
point, it is possible to distinguish between the impact of a ‘good’ genius and
an ‘evil’ genius’ according to the nature of the socio-historical impact; and
we will also consider the semi-genius or borderline genius – someone who has
made a significant impact short of crossing the threshold into world historical
importance.

Chapter Four

The Creative
Triad

The Endogenous personality, as we
have discussed, refers to someone who is inner-orientated. Our suggestion is
that this personality complex is associated with genuine creativity and – in
rare instances, with creative genius. This raises an important question
immediately. What does it mean to be creative? What is the nature of
creativity?

We can conceive of a Creative Triad. It is composed of (1)
Innate ability (2) Inner-motivation, and (3) Intuitive thinking. This triad is
the essence of how we use the word ‘creative’ in everyday life. The ‘creative’
type is the ‘arty’ type: the novelist, the poet, and especially the artist; and
by extension, also the truly original scientist and technological innovator.

Genius is made possible when all parts of this Triad flow
together in a particular way: a person is internally-motivated to pursue that
for which he has a natural ability; and does so in an ‘‘intuitive’’ way that
mobilizes his deepest self, all his mental powers. Major genius occurs when the
‘natural ability’ dimension is also extremely high.

But people can still be ‘creative’ yet not reach the level
of genius, they may be considered as semi- or borderline-genius when their
historic impact on a society is real but modest. For example, there are
numerous ‘local geniuses’ who are relative geniuses compared to those around
them, and make genius type social contributions – but their impact is
geographically or temporally restricted. Most geniuses are, in fact, of this
type.

And, of course, a potential genius may (for reasons we will
discuss later) fail to make an influential break-through or may make a
breakthrough that fails to be recognized and acted-upon.

Before turning, then, to the nature of ‘the creative’ we
need to be clear on the nature of each of its component parts and how they
contribute to creativity and genius. It is clear how ‘innate ability’ does, but
what about intuition? What is intuition?

We could approach intuition by stating that intuition is the
mode of thought of the private soul/ the real self/ inner consciousness – that
is to say the most profound, the most secret, fundamental mode of thought.
Intuition can be contrasted with two (lower, subordinated) modes of thinking:
passions versus reason; the body v the brain; gut-feelings v head-knowledge;
instinct v logic. These two modes are not absolutely distinct, but we think
they can usefully be distinguished.

So, what is the thought mode of intuition? It is not by
instinct nor by logic – but by something of both, and more. Therefore,
intuition is a mode of thinking which simultaneously uses emotion and logic but
operating in a context of (for example) motivation, purpose, meaning and
relationships. In a nutshell, intuition
uses all possible modes of thinking; and this is why intuition leads to a
greater feeling of sureness, of certainty, than do other, more partial forms of
thought.

The result of intuition is therefore an evaluation which is
uniquely convincing because it is validated by the full range of positive
responses. It is an insight that satisfies both logic and reason, and also ‘feels’
right. By contrast, if we use only (for example) logic, or only emotions, to
evaluate something; then the evaluation will be incomplete, and evaluation in
one sub-mode may be contradicted by evaluation in another sub-mode – as when
logic and emotions reach different conclusions, point in different directions,
contradict one-another – and we feel confused or torn because our head and our
heart are in conflict.

Only the evaluations of intuition are fully satisfying,
fully convincing, and harmonious. Only the evaluations of intuition mobilize
the whole range of thought modes. Thus intuition
is the most powerful mode of thought, and the only mode of thought capable
of mobilizing the fullest degree of motivation. Intuition is what makes us care
most about ideas: it is what engages
us with creativity. This is why intuition is necessary to the highest levels of
creativity, to the greatest attainments of genius.

Our second question is: what is inner motivation and why is
it necessary for creativity and genius?

The genius must combine the inner orientation of the
contemplative – in order to find his own problem, the problem he is destined to
work on; with an inner motivation towards action directed to solving this
problem. He must desire to translate understanding into engagement; not just to
contemplate reality, but to ‘solve’ reality.

So, something deep within the genius – and not the promise
of an external reward – makes him want to fully comprehend or improve or
express the nature of reality. Because his motivation comes from within, and he
is focused upon a problem which also comes from within, the genius is not
easily discouraged; his drive will enable him – will indeed compel him – to
keep pushing and pushing, even when support is withdrawn or he is met by
discouragement and failure.

Therefore – when it comes to his own problem – the genius is
autonomous, self-motivating, tenacious and stubborn in pursuit of his Destiny.
He will see the Genius Quest, as we might term it, through to its conclusion in
Illumination or ‘die in the attempt’ – unless he is actively prevented from
doing so.

In summary, the creative personality of a genius involves an
Inner orientation which includes a basis in intuitive modes of thinking and an
inner source of motivation – we will now further explore the nature of this
motivation.

Chapter Five

What
Motivates the Genius Quest?

The genius –has a ‘journey’ to make,
a ‘path’ to take – a ‘way’ to live: a Quest.

Pursuing this Quest is the Destiny of the genius – it is
what he is ‘meant to do’.

After this, various things may happen. The Quest may be discovered
and embarked upon, but there is no guarantee it will be completed. It may be
tried but may fail. The genius may die, or get sick before it is finished – or
in some way be thwarted or defeated. The Destiny may be accepted, but may later
be abandoned; because the commitment must be renewed many times. Illumination
may actually be achieved but rejected by society – the genius unrecognised. Or,
Illumination may be achieved but stolen and no credit given. Or the Quest may
be achieved, and the Illumination socially-accepted, and acknowledgement may
even be given… but then the genius becomes corrupted into careerism, status
seeking, pleasure seeking, or whatever takes him away from his Destiny.

As an example of an abandoned Quest, the mathematician and
historian of science Jacob Bronowski (1908-1974) claimed, in in his 1972 TV
series The Ascent of Man, that this
was the fate of the mathematical and computing genius – and friend of
Bronowski’s – John von Neumann (1903-1957). Von Neumann was, late in life,
lured away from focusing on his intellectual pursuits by love of power, status
and prestige – leaving his work incomplete. And such was the greatness of von
Neumann, that it proved difficult, indeed impossible, for anyone else to
complete it. So, here was a real genius who accepted and partially-completed
his unique Quest – yet without quite finishing what he began.

Psychoticism versus Openness

This emphasis on Destiny stresses
that the genius has an unusual life, compared with normal people. But what does
the genius get out of his unusual life?

Usually, he will simply enjoy being creative; and, indeed,
being-creative will be a significant part of his sense of self, consequently he
will be a noticeably different kind of person from the one whom we would see as
‘conventional.’

Hans Eysenck regarded creativity as an aspect of the
Psychoticism trait – indicating a particular way of thinking and relating to
the world which incorporated creativity as positive, and psychotic and
psychopathic traits as negative, aspects of this trait.

Working more recently, British psychologist Daniel Nettle’s
review of the psychological literature has shown that certain personality
traits – in particular Openness-Intellect and Neuroticism – are associated with
being creative, quite independent of being a highly successful creative – and
indeed most personality psychologists nowadays regard Openness as the
characteristic trait of a creative person.[30]

So which is the best way of conceptualizing the personality
of a creative person? Is it the eccentricity and originality and semi-craziness
of Psychoticism, or the novelty-generation; and clever, fashionable fertility
of Openness?

This is a topic to which we will return, but in brief we
favour the older concept of Psychoticism as a better description of creativity
– and we have derived the Endogenous personality from Eysenck’s analysis of the
genius. However, we have departed from Eysenck by emphasizing that the high
Endogenicity variable is rooted in group adaptiveness, and not in individual
pathology. Also, we focus on a brain specialized by an innate inner-ness of orientation as the basis
of the personality trait cluster; whereas Eysenck explained higher Psychoticism
in terms of a broader field of associations.

Our reason for our preference and emphasis for rejecting the
currently dominant explanation of creativity by Openness and our advocacy of a
development of the older idea of Psychoticism; is that Openness and Psychoticism
(Endogenous personality) are at opposite ends of the General Factor Personality
dimension: Openness is pro-social and Psychoticism/ Endogenous is a-social.

In other words, Openness type creativity is a response from
a conscientious and empathic person to social demands or needs; while
Psychoticism/ Endogenous creativity comes from the inner and innate drive of
someone substantially indifferent to current societal self-awareness, knowledge
and roles.

As such, we would suggest that ‘creative’ is not what you ‘do’
but what you ‘are.’

The satisfactions of creativity

Creative people thus reflect a
certain kind of personality, leading to characteristic behaviours. But why do
creative people behave creatively? What exactly do ‘creatives’ get out of being
creative? What, in other words, is the phenomenology
of creativity? (Note: Phenomenology refers to first-person, inner, subjective
experience – how things look ‘from the inside’).

People could only be creative by disposition if creativity
were supported with positive and rewarding emotions and/or provided relief from
negative or aversive emotions. This would seem to work in three stages:

Discontent
– Delight – Satisfaction

Corresponding to:

Perceiving
a Problem – Having an Insight – Generating a Solution

Therefore, creativity is driven by a negative or ‘Dysphoric’
feeling – that some state of affairs produces an emotion of dissatisfaction. ‘The
creative’ (as we shall term him) then turns his attention to this ‘‘problem’’ –
and he enjoys working on the problem (that is, he enjoys ‘being creative’); and finally he may come up with an insight which
leads to a euphoric feeling of delight.

So, the creative is rewarded up-front for generating
insights – by working on a problem he both gets relief from a negative state of
inner dissatisfaction and is also positively rewarded by an inner fulfilment by
the work – and this happens whether or not his insights eventually turn-out to
be answers. As such, the creative will tend to generate insights for the sheer fun of it! – and even if
the insights turn-out to be trivial, erroneous, useless, or harmful.

But, finally, with persistence and luck on his side; let us
say that the creative comes up with a solution to the problem: a solution which,
for a shortish period (minutes or hours, perhaps), makes him feel joyously
happy or ‘Euphoric’!

Thus a Dysphoric state of Discontent has then been replaced
by a Euphoric state; and when Euphoria subsides the successful creative will
move onto a longer-term and sustained state of satisfaction or gratification – and
this can be termed ‘Euthymic’, meaning a state of ‘normal’ good mood.
Therefore, first Euphoria, then Euthymia are the emotional rewards for
creativity.

So, in terms of phenomenology, it goes:

Dysphoria – Euphoria – Euthymia

Or, in English: Discontent, Bliss, Satisfaction

In terms of the larger picture of Life, this is the
discontented state of seeking Destiny and the gratification of discovering it;
embarking on a Quest – which is itself a satisfying albeit frustrating
activity; and finally achieving Illumination – which leads to an acute state of
bliss then a chronic state of satisfaction (and quite likely a new search for
another Destiny).

Therefore, for the creative person, a normal life in
conformity with social expectations is unsatisfying; but being creative is
rewarding. Such a person will be spontaneously
creative, as a consequence of their inner drives and personal satisfactions;
and creative whether asked to be creative or not, whether it is useful or not,
and whether he is sufficiently knowledgeable and competent for the task or not.

Accordingly, if real creativity is wanted or needed, then the
job absolutely requires a creative person. And if you have a creative person in
place, and he is sufficiently interested in what you want him to do, then he will be creative.

However, since creativity is inwardly generated by innate
mechanisms, such creativity is not externally controllable and directable by
normal social pressures, rewards, priorities. Both to get the best from a
creative, and also to have that best be directed where desired, requires that
the creative be animated, inspirited and energized by the task; and allowed to
work in his own way.

Therefore a genius can neither be ‘managed’ nor ‘regulated’
– although he may to some extent be ‘led’ by a sufficiently inspiring and
insightful individual

Chapter Six

Successful
Creativity

Now that we have an understanding of
the creative person, his personality, and what motivates him, we must tease out
the difference between the ‘creative’ and the genius. In essence, we argue that
the creative genius is a sub-species
of the creative type, and the genuinely creative is characterized by the
Endogenous personality type. So, the genius is the most successful and able and
obvious type of ‘creative’ – and genius is an extreme form of creativity
combined with other attributes (mainly exceptional ability, and especially with
exceptional intelligence).

We have already proposed a correspondence between genius –
understood as having an enormous impact in some field through highly original
activity – and creativity. We would expect the genius to be ‘creative’ but
there is a difference between being ‘creative’ (as it is commonly defined) and
actually being original and insightful.

For example, people tend to think that poetry is
intrinsically a creative activity – but we would emphasize that most self-styled
or professionally-recognized poets are not especially creative, and that much
greater creativity may be found among some people who are doing (for example)
practical work, or caring for children than among the typical writer and
publisher of poems.

In other words, properly understood, ‘poetry’ is a social
function (a job, a hobby, an educational or academic task) which may be done
more, or less, creatively – and this is probably the usual situation for most
social roles. However, at the very highest level – a level that is at best rare
and sometimes absent from society – poetry is indeed (of course!) a paradigm of
creativity, and The Poet the epitome of genius.

What of originality? The originality of a creative person is
likely to be achieved without being aimed at, through combining creativity with
innate ability (in particular, intelligence) and a lack of concern about the
reaction to one’s originality. Sometimes, in honest and creative pursuit of
some goal (on a Quest), you need to break conventions and rules. The reaction
to that which challenges the vested interests of the status quo is generally negative – so creativity risks alienating powerful
people and causing irritation or even hostility.

Therefore there is an association
between creativity and originality, and between originality and offensiveness.
But, on the other hand, the opposite is untrue; so, it is not true to say that that which causes irritation, offence and
hostility is therefore original; nor
to say that what is original is therefore
creative.

Nonetheless, this falsely reversed causality has been the
prevalent way in which creativity and originality have been identified in the
modern era; for instance in the visual arts since the era of Dadaism about a
century ago.[31]
In avant garde circles, successfully
provoking outrage (especially among ‘respectable’ people and the religious) has
usually been regarded as sufficient evidence of originality, hence genius –
leading to the ludicrous situation in which artistically-talentless confidence
tricksters and public relations manipulators have successfully passed
themselves off as artistic geniuses, and for three or four generations have
dominated the professional world of Art.

Furthermore, in discussing creativity, a decision must be
made as to whether we are going to give primacy to creative process or creative
outcome. Not neglecting the other of the pair: but one of the two must come
first.

We put process first – and therefore we discuss creativity as
a disposition and process, and how these lead to what are generally regarded as
creative outcomes. This opens a potential gap between creative activity and
creative outcomes. So if a science Nobel Prize is regarded as a creative
outcome, then we would say that some science Nobel Prize winners were highly
creative persons – although some were not.

Some Nobelists seemingly got the prize in other ways: for
instance by stealing or otherwise getting credit for the ideas or work of other
people, or by careful and conscientious work extending the creative
breakthroughs of others, or by self-promotion, or from lack of any really
deserving prize-winners (this, especially, in recent years – when the supply of
geniuses has all-but dried-up, and science has become more bureaucratic and
less creative); or simply by errors or corruption or committee-think on the
part of the Nobel prize committee.

And much the same would apply to great composers, great
writers, great visual artists etc.

But if, instead, creativity is defined in terms of process, as a mode of thinking; then
this means that many or most of the people who produce work (or outcomes) that
are generally regarded as extremely useful, beautiful or true – are not creative people.

For example, the work of British Nobelist Dorothy Hodgkin
(1910-1994) was mostly a careful extension of the primary work of Desmond
Bernal (1901-1971; her mentor and lover) – who was the real genius behind X-Ray
Crystallography – but it was Hodgkin who did the work that got the prize. Significantly,
Bernal had the classical genius temperament[32]
while Hodgkin – although extremely clever and skilful – showed hardly a spark
of real ‘Endogenous’ creativity.[33]

Furthermore, many or most creative people (‘creatives’) nowadays
do not achieve anything that is generally regarded as useful, beautiful or true.
We know of relatively unknown and unacknowledged ‘creatives’ who also have
truly great abilities and are probably potential geniuses, but lack either the
application or the luck to have made an influential breakthrough; or else their
breakthroughs were not acknowledged as such. Indeed, some have suffered
aggressive and harmful persecutions, such as professional harassment and mass
media mobbing, for their honesty. For example, an insightful and original
scientist working in an obscure branch of medicine, a major theoretician
working in a field where only empirical and large scale research is valued...

Sometimes, the achievement of a genius seems to have hung by
a thread; if British Nobellist and DNA-discoverer Francis Crick (1916-2004) had
died at age 35, or had lived a generation later, he would have been regarded as
one of these – merely a brilliant, restless, unfulfilled dilettante.

The ‘evil genius’ phenomenon

It may happen that a highly creative
person, by chance or design, deploys their creativity in such a way that it
destroys their own field: a Picasso, a James Joyce, a Schoenberg… men of genius
whose work was highly influential and brilliant, but who left their subjects
and the world a worse place than they found it: they were each, artistically, a
dead-end. These are versions of the ‘evil genius’ – so named because of their
effects, rather than necessarily their motivations.

From the vantage point of creating something useful (to
maintaining and developing civilization), beautiful or true, Pablo Picasso’s
(1881-1973) artistic philosophy involved rejecting the idea that art should
create beauty and a road to transcendence. His purpose was to challenge the
accepted way of doing art and so challenge all that was established, including
that which is useful. In so-doing, his art created a sense of shock, confusion,
and meaninglessness and contributed to anarchy.[34] The
novels and stories of James Joyce (1882-1941) share much of this philosophy. The Dubliners, for example, horrified
audiences with its detailed depictions of depraved behaviour and these actually
occurring in real (named) streets and pubs. The stories take the reader into a
world of nihilism and Finnegan’s Wake simply
creates a sense of ‘profound’ confusion.[35] As
for Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), he shunned musical harmony and tradition in
favour of a highly-structured but incomprehensible kind of music which most
people find it actively-unpleasant to listen to . . . a world in which nothing
makes sense, there is no meaning, there is negativity, there is the Void.[36]

So, these evil geniuses may or may not have had
exceptionally wicked personalities, although all were somewhat unpleasant
characters[37]
– but they did have a net-destructive effect on society. This effect was
net-destructive because they advanced a compelling but destructive worldview;
one which led to the suppression of, for example, the ability of people to
perceive meaning and purpose in life, or active-encouragement of selfish,
parasitic, or cruel behaviour.

Other examples might be philosophers such as Rousseau, Marx
or Nietzsche.[38]
From the vantage point already outlined, the philosophy of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau (1712-1778) rejected civilization in favour of a more ‘natural’ life
modelled on a romantic-ideal of the tribe in which all were supposedly equal
and free. This would be a dictatorship of ‘the people’ in which dissent,
however, could not be tolerated; with dissenters labelled (in the
Rousseau-influenced French Revolution) as ‘enemies of the people.’

Karl Marx’s (1818-1883) philosophy – heavily influenced by
Rousseau – altered the idealized group from the ‘tribe’ to the ‘worker’ and
argued that a worker’s dictatorship must inevitably develop to ensure equality
based on Marx’s fate-based understanding of History. Again, dissent was not to
be permitted and dissenters were ‘enemies,’ ‘imperialists’ and so on. Its
culmination was the world-historical horror of twentieth century Communism, and
its descendant Political Correct-ness, in which ‘the worker’ is replaced by
supposedly oppressed or more natural ‘cultural’ groups. Dissenters are ‘racist’
and other catch-all, highly emotive terms (such as ‘hater’ or ‘denialist’)
employed to discourage dissent, such that even the slightest deviance from
orthodoxy is termed ‘racist’ in order to reprove it and intimidate the deviant
into silence.[39]
These ideologies can distilled down to three essential dogmas: (1) Those who
have power – whether financial or cultural and whether deserved or not – are
bad and should repent by giving it to those who lack power and creating
‘equality’ (2) Those who lack power – on whatever measure is seen as important
– are superior to those who have it because they are somehow more genuine and (3)
Those who dissent from this view are wicked. As such, the dogma of ‘equality’
serves to create a ‘thought prison’ which would be antithetical to genius and,
in both cases, the desires of a ‘natural group’ must be put before all else,
including making the decisions required to maintain civilization.

Multiculturalism is related to Political Correctness,
arguing that Western countries benefit from disempowering their cultural
majority in favour of a cultural melting pot, and systematically privileging
non-native ethnic groups. This is underpinned by cultural and moral relativism;
and this brings us to the genius of F. W. Nietzsche (1844-1900).

Nietzsche’s work is complex, self-contradictory, evolving;
esoteric and brilliant in style, of superb literary quality and shot-through
with memorable, incisive insights. Nonetheless the net effect of Nietzsche has been bad. He argued for a kind of moral
and cultural relativism, or even a moral inversion by which traditional human
values are reversed: what was evil becomes good and vice versa. The basic idea was that people in general, and the
natural leaders of ‘Supermen’ in particular, should pursue their wild,
instinctive, amoral dominant desires, helping them to be creative,
life-affirming and to experience the heights of ecstasy. In Beyond Good and Evil, he clearly
advocates moral relativism, arguing that what is ‘moral’ depends on whether you
are a ‘master’ or a ‘servant.’ In The
Anti-Christ, it is argued that the only ‘good’ is the gaining of power. So,
in essence, Nietzsche advocates living an utterly selfish life in pursuit of
one’s own power. Clearly, if everyone lived in such a way civilization would
collapse and there would be no room to philosophize at all.[40]

On top of this; Nietzsche’s sister edited, emphasized and
altered his works to make them even more appealing to the embryonic National
Socialists – eventually the Nazis came to regard his Thus Spake Zarathustra as an equivalent of the Bible, and issued
tens of thousands of copies to soldiers for their spiritual guidance… On the
one hand, there is no doubt that Nietzsche himself would strongly have
disapproved of this; on the other hand, it does not require much in the way of
selection and distortion to extract Nazism from Nietzsche.

So it is not necessarily a compliment to call somebody
creative or ‘a creative’ – really, it is simply a description of a personality type.

Once we understand genius or high impact originality in
terms of achievement, then there is a clear quantitative basis for asserting
that a relationship exists between this and being disagreeable; and it is this
combination of creativity, ability and being disagreeable which can lead to
genius. American psychologist Dean Simonton has conducted a great deal of
research on this subject and has found that academics who are considered highly
original – and, indeed, recognized geniuses – tend to have distinctive
personality features.[41]

According to Simonton, geniuses usually have a personality
type characterized by moderately high Psychoticism; that is: a psychosis-/
dream-like mode of thinking; indifference to public opinion; moderately low
Agreeableness/ Empathizing and moderately low Conscientiousness. This,
according to Simonton, is usually combined with high Openness-Intellect
(strongly associated with creativity), and high Neuroticism (in the case of
artistic geniuses) and high Extraversion (in the case of scientific geniuses).

As a reminder, we argue that this rather vague and complex
constellation of statistical associations between traits can more
parsimoniously, and validly, be conceptualized as the Endogenous personality.
Furthermore, we will look below at how high levels of Neuroticism and
Extraversion may actually be an artefact, due to the only-approximate validity
of measuring what are inferred to be dispositional traits in terms of overt
behaviour.

Both genius artists and scientists in turn combine this kind
of personality with extremely high – outlier levels of – intelligence. Outlier
intelligence occurs when chance combinations of genes in relatively intelligent
parents lead to extreme intelligence in one of the offspring. Most children
have intelligence at a similar level to the average of their parents; but it is
quite possible for children to be far more – or less – intelligent than their
parents, though this is rare. It is even rarer, though still possible, that
average or even below average parents could produce a highly intelligent child.

Therefore genius is most frequently found among offspring of
the most intelligent people, but can be found almost anywhere, albeit at lower
frequencies.

This seems difficult to explain in the way that intelligence
is normally considered – in terms of intelligence being a consequence of very
large numbers (thousands?) of genes-for-intelligence. With intelligence genes
conceptualized as additive in effect, and in such large numbers, it is hard to
understand how a very highly intelligent child could emerge by chance from low-intelligence
parents. But if a person’s level of intelligence is also determined by the
number of deleterious mutations they inherit from their parents, and these
mutations are numbered in tens – then it is imaginable that, by chance, a child
may be born with very few deleterious mutations, despite his parents having a
relatively heavy mutation load.

This notion is perhaps testable, on the basis that a low
mutation load should be associated with generally higher fitness, and therefore
with traits associated with high fitness – so the high intelligence child of
low intelligence parents would be expected to be (on average) taller,
healthier, more symmetrical, and more long-lived than his low intelligence
parents.

The face and body have evolved to be symmetrical. Thus, facial
symmetry shows that relatively few genetic mutations, which are almost always
negative, have been inherited. It also shows that a symmetrical phenotype has
been maintained in the face of disease, implying a genetically good immune
system. Symmetrical people are, therefore, regarded as attractive because their
appearance advertises their genetic good health.[42]
Studies have actually shown a weak positive correlation between intelligence
and facial symmetry.[43]

But, although highly intelligent children of less-intelligent
parents have been, by chance, spared from the effects of deleterious mutations on the brain; nonetheless they would be
likely to be carrying more deleterious mutations than the highly intelligent children
of highly intelligent parents (because not all mutations affect the brain). So
among the highly intelligent children of less intelligent parents, there might
be evidence of relatively higher levels of other mutation-related dysfunctions
– e.g. social maladaptiveness, psychosexual dysfunctions, psychiatric problems,
fluctuating asymmetry or physical illnesses with a genetic basis.

It should also be noted that intelligence affects behaviour.
High intelligence may act as a counterbalance to a personality type that would
otherwise be associated with asocial behaviours characteristic of low General
Factor of Personality (GFP). High IQ in a low GFP person provides a strong future
orientation and self-control – due to a heightened ability to predict the consequences
of their actions and a greater concern with the long-term[44]
– that such individuals would otherwise lack from their inherited personality
traits.

Whereas with high intelligence a low GFP person may be
merely a-social –uninterested by society; low GFP person andlow intelligence might well be anti-social – that is, significantly
hostile, or actively socially destructive in their behaviour.

Chapter Seven

Identifying
the Genius

When genius is defined as a type of
person who evolved to benefit the group (by innovatively being able to solve
novel problems and enhance social cohesion, survival and population growth), it
can be understood that it is beneficial for societies to be able to recognize and identify potential
geniuses; so that they may be helped, tolerated; or at the least not actively
attacked and suppressed.

But there has long been a confusion or blurring of the
genius personality type with psychosis – with insanity: as in the phrase of
English poet John Dryden (1631-1700): “Great wits to madness sure are near
allied, and thin partitions do their bounds divide”. Furthermore, there is a
relatively higher incidence of some forms of madness (especially melancholia
and mania) and also alcoholism and drug abuse among geniuses and other creative
people than among comparable control subjects.[45]

Yet we argue that creativity is not caused by madness, not
even by partial degrees of psychosis – rather we argue that most madness is
utterly uncreative, being maladaptive and caused by accidental pathology; while
the root of creativity is to be found in the Endogenous personality, which is
an adaptation that evolved to perform a valuable social function.

However, and this is a subtle but vital distinction, we
acknowledge that there is indeed – as H. J. Eysenck described in his 1995 book Genius[46] – a
higher than normal rate of psychotic illness, a higher than normal rate of
psychopathic traits (which include low Agreeableness and low Conscientiousness
but also more subtle characteristics)[47] and
drug and alcohol problems among geniuses. We would explain this in terms of the
Endogenous personality being an evolved adaptation for creativity, but one
which is more than usually vulnerable to psychosis, psychopathy and drug addiction
when there are further predisposing factors; genetic, environmental, social or
whatever. But we regard the genius as being a specialized type arising as a
result of evolution by natural selection; and therefore genius is not – as Eysenck tended to think – a
result of a partial degree of illness, antisocial personality, sickness or
stress.

But the co-occurrence of madness and genius leads to a practical
problem when trying to identify genius – how could we discriminate between
uncreative insanity and the potential for creative genius? How can one tell if
someone has the Endogenous personality type, rather than just being socially-impaired
for some reason? The difference is real and important.

To do this, we need to examine the Endogenous personality
type in more detail. We have seen that there are two main aspects to genius:
characteristic personality traits and outlier levels of high intelligence. We
will begin with personality traits.

The Endogenous person has a strong inner motivation. He does
not avoid groups and social responsibilities simply for negative reasons such
as lack of interest, because he wants to do nothing; but because he wants to ‘‘do
his own thing’’, because he is powerfully interested in some very specific
thing.

The Endogenous person is therefore being driven to do something. His mind is usually
brooding on his ‘problem’, full of plans and aims and aspirations. These may or
may not come to fruition – some people with an Endogenous personality are
late-developers, and may superficially seem to be adrift, or to change
direction too frequently to become successful; but they are actually trying
to find their subject, trying to find their Destiny.

For example; Einstein did not shine at school and failed to
achieve his first career aims, doing his first major work and completing a PhD
in his spare time while employed as a Patent Office clerk.[48]
Francis Crick (1916-2004) attended his second choice university (he was
rejected from Cambridge so went to University College, London), achieved only a
second class degree, started and gave-up two PhDs, and worked on naval research
before he found what he ‘‘should’’ have been doing only in his mid-thirties,
going on to co-discover the structure of DNA then making further fundamental
contributions to unravelling the genetic code.[49]

Was there anything that could differentiate between drifting
potential geniuses who have not yet found their destiny – people like the young
Einstein and Crick; and people who are merely-drifting, starting and failing,
unable to apply-themselves because they have something wrong with them?

Extraversion- Introversion trait

What kind of personality results in
such a disposition towards genius? We have already looked at the personality
type seemingly associated with academics who are regarded as creative in their
fields and, indeed, as geniuses in terms of the mainstream ‘Big Five’ traits.

There are, however, problems in measuring some of these
traits when it comes to genius. In general, it would be expected that the
genius ought to be high in the Introversion trait – in the sense that
introverts are inner-stimulated and autonomous of their environment, in
contrast with extraverts who depend on external stimulus to maintain a state of
arousal or alertness.

But the self-rating scales for measuring Introversion focus
on behaviours and not psychological mechanisms, focus on outcomes not processes
– therefore those scoring high in Introversion will include people who are
simply anhedonic (unable to experience pleasure), inactive; who lack motivation
and drive – and these attributes would be fatal to the prospects of a genius
accomplishing anything significant.

In other words, true, underlying Introversion would be a characteristic
of genius, but a high score on the Introversion rating scale would also contain
under-motivated people – thereby blurring the measurement by misclassification
error.

Thus, a genius needs to be a genuine Introvert; but people
with various pathologies might lead to ‘‘false positive’’ measures of high Introversion.
This may explain the counter-intuitive finding that creative scientists are
high in Extraversion – since geniuses are very rare, most of the high
Introversion scores are contributed by those suffering from pathology.

Neuroticism – Emotional Stability trait

Analogously, but in the opposite
direction, high Neuroticism (N) would be bad for a genius, in the sense that N
refers to an unpleasant and overwhelming sensitivity of emotions and moods to
the environment – such that a high N person tends easily to be overwhelmed with
negative emotions such as anxiety, shyness, low self-esteem, misery etc.

But the opposite state of low-N (or high Emotional
Stability) as it is measured by behavioural questionnaires, is also potentially
hostile to genius, since it implies an insensitivity to events; a lack of
emotional-responsiveness – and low-N-scorers include people with weak emotions
and people with emotional insensitivity. These would all tend to be a
disadvantage to genius – since emotions are used to evaluate situations and
evidence; so weak emotions would tend to impair discrimination.

These would be the underlying processes of Neuroticism, but
in practice N is measured using a tally of (usually self-reported) ‘superficial’
behavioural traits – and these could not distinguish between different causes
of the same behaviour; and so would conflate subtle and useful emotional
sensitivity, with the pathological state of too-easy triggering of
negative emotions.

So, a genius might score as somewhat high in N, simply
because he experiences emotions strongly; but this would not necessarily
reflect a pathological sensitivity.

We have already seen that genius is
associated with trait Psychoticism. The inverse correlation of Creativity in
terms of Conscientiousness (C) and Agreeableness (A) is understandable, and
necessary – once C and A are properly understood.

Creativity implies a strong ego, a person who looks at a
situation and comes up with something different because he believes it possible
– even probable – that he knows better than other people, and is (to some
extent) indifferent to the opinions of others on this matter.

Why does this entail low C? Well, Conscientiousness is
sometimes conceptualized in terms of delayed gratification – the ability to
put-off gratification now, in return for greater gratification in the future.
For example, to defer the pleasure of playing, and instead study academic
subjects – foregoing the current pleasure of play, and suffering the tedium of
work, for a (hoped for) greater pleasure in the future.

But this is an error – because it is not the way the mind is
motivated. The mind actually works by maximizing current gratification – by doing what is positively rewarding here
and now, and avoiding what yields negative emotions. Therefore, the proper way
to conceptualize Conscientiousness is that a high C person gets more
gratification here and now by doing what he feels it is best to do, or
necessary to do, or which he has been told to do by an authority, or what he is
supposed to do according to peer pressure.

Therefore, high C implies a high degree of concern for
internalized social norms – a tendency to feel good (here and now) when
conforming to these social norms/ values – and/or a tendency to feel bad (e.g.
guilty, ashamed, afraid) when transgressing or failing to follow these social
norms.

And this is what links Conscientiousness to Agreeableness
(or Simon Baron Cohen’s trait of Empathizing, which correlates highly with A).[50]
High Agreeableness is a self-evaluation for having a dominating concern with
the views of other people – paying close attention to knowing the emotions and
wishes of others: that is, a calibration of one’s own (observed or perceived)
behaviours to stay in line with the expectations or desires of others. Such a
concern would be fatal to the chances of a genius attaining his Destiny.

So, it can be seen that Conscientiousness and Agreeableness
are two sides of the same coin (and the inverse of Psychoticism) – which is
that a person high in Conscientiousness and also Agreeableness is one who – here
and now, and in the present moment – derives the greatest satisfaction from his
conformity to the social group, and is attentive to cues of social group
values: and (more important) who has aversive feelings if he transgresses or he
fails to follow social norms, such as would happen if creative thinking was in
play.

And such a person is not
creative – because he is focused on learning and doing what the social group wants
him to do, instead of what his inner drives tell him he ought to do: needs to
do.

Creativity in low Psychoticism people

Although creativity is strongest in
those high in the personality trait of Psychoticism (P) when combined with high
intelligence (indicating a fundamentally functional and healthy brain), it is
not restricted to those of high-P personality: probably, everyone is creative
to some extent.

How then does creativity show itself in low-P individuals? –
given that the distribution of Psychoticism within the population is ‘positively-skewed’
– in other words a majority of people are low in Psychoticism, and only a small
proportion high in P?

In people low in Psychoticism, creativity is there but weak,
seldom activated, not-dominant, short-lived and – as a rule – subordinated to
social (including sexual) imperatives which are the primary drive for most
people. Of course, almost by definition, creativity in the normal majority of
people is not necessarily impressive, and is also rarely activated. So this
low-level, relatively-infrequent creativity tends to be private, and almost
invisible at a societal level (especially in large modern societies).

The easiest way to see low level creativity is perhaps in
children – especially in older but pre-pubertal children (aged about 6-12), and
their ‘crazes’ and hobbies. Boys often have very creative hobbies in which they
become mini-experts and avid dissenters on such subjects as cars, aeroplanes,
sports, dinosaurs etc. – also in reading (and memorizing) particular books (on
favourite themes or by favourite authors), or TV series. These children often
live chunks of their leisure time psychologically-inside a very intense
parallel ‘fantasy world’.

Normal and average creativity is therefore seen in hobbies, and how people use their
discretionary time; and the fact that hobbies are for most people subordinated
to work, relationships and daily life is due to the low-P, low creativity
personality.

Normal people are creative, to some subsidiary extent; and
they fit creativity into their lives. But geniuses do the opposite: fit their
lives around their hobbies; and geniuses usually make their hobbies (their avocations)
into their life (their vocations).

The Asocial genius

Humans are social animals: most Men
see the world through social spectacles.

But a genius is not like this. The genius does not have a
single, stereotypical, positive personality type (because Endogenous
personalities are very various in terms of traits such as likeableness,
helpfulness, and personal warmth) – but geniuses are characterised by not being primarily social animals. A
genius is one whose main focus and motivation is not social, nor sexual; but
instead abstract, asocial – whether artistic, scientific, technical, or
whatever it may be.

Could it then be that the genius uses for abstract thinking,
those brain-systems which in most people are used for social intelligence? That
in the genius the social intelligence system is wired-up to internal stimuli
instead of to social situations? It seems that the genius deploys the social
intelligence parts of the brain for other purposes – and that therefore the
usual spontaneous motivation and attention that goes to social material is
instead – automatically – being harnessed and deployed to deal with other and
inner-generated material. This seems to us very likely; although such aspects
of brain structure have not yet been reliably measured. But given that the
genius brain seems to be hard-wired for both creativity and intelligence; it is
plausible that this may be made possible by functional re-deployment of at
least some aspects of social/ sexual circuitry.

So, it is not that geniuses lack social intelligence (the
genius is not ‘autistic’ in the sense of having a deficit or defect in social
intelligence); rather that geniuses have all the ‘equipment’ necessary for
social intelligence, but are ‘wired-up’ to use their social intelligence for
other and not-social purposes.

Specifically, the genius’s social intelligence may be
wired-up to internally-generated material (instead of attending to actual
people in the environment and from memory). The spontaneous interest and
concern with ‘‘other people’’ that is characteristic of most people is, in the
genius, directed to whatever ‘abstract’ subject the genius has a vocation-for.

Another way of thinking about this is that the genius may be
able to deploy extra ‘‘brain power’’ in problem solving, by ‘‘co-opting’’ the
brain regions normally used for social intelligence. And not only brain power –
but the distinctive ‘‘theory of mind’’ mode of thinking which characterises
social intelligence. So the genius often thinks about ‘‘his subject’’ in a
social-like way – as a world populated by entities with motivations and
dispositions and each having a purpose.

Social intelligence could be much of what is creative about
creativity; because to think about abstract things ‘anthropomorphically’ with
social intelligence, or animistically as if they were sentient social agents,
perhaps opens-up a new and probably more creative, intuitive and flexible way
of thinking.[51]

The Endogenous personality also has very high intelligence.
This may be apparent through good exam results in a ‘g’-loaded evaluation, but
may require formal intelligence testing to detect, if the individual has either
suffered from poor or absent education, or else lacks the conscientiousness to
apply himself to his studies. And sometimes intelligence tests won’t do justice
to the genius’s abilities.

That the intelligence of the Endogenous Personality can sometimes
not be identified in a conventional way is of crucial importance. Often, the
genius will have extremely pronounced abilities in one area of intelligence –
such as verbal intelligence – but will be less skilled in other areas. Einstein,
for example, had such high mathematical abilities that he developed an original
proof of Pythagoras’ theorem at the age of 12. However, his linguistic
abilities were so deficient that he failed the entrance exam for the Federal
Institute of Technology in Zurich.[52] Consequently,
though an IQ test can capture general intelligence it will not necessarily be
able to capture genuine genius.

So, the Endogenous personality may be recognized not just by
their relative autonomy – that is, their lack of need for social validation and
consequent lack of interest in social and sexual matters – but also by their
high intelligence and positive motivation to do (or to find) ... whatever it is
that they are equipped by their nature to do.

Chapter Eight

Destiny
versus Conscientiousness

The Creative Triad is a minimum
requirement, of course, and there are other features that may help to identify a
genius. One of the marked features of the Endogenous Personality is a sense of
Destiny. This leads to a Quest and, eventually, Illumination. We are prone to
think of only the last step in this journey: the Eureka moment’ of Illumination when the genius is flooded with insight
and sees the answer to his problem, and what the answer means. But there are at
least three distinct phases of which this comes late.

1.
Destiny

From childhood, youth or early adult
life there is a sense of destiny, of having some special role to play. This
destiny is accepted, not chosen; so that the task is not to manufacture, invent
or devise a destiny; but rather to discover, to find-out the nature of one’s
own personal and unique destiny. Such a process of discovery is a matter of
trial and error, following hunches, drifting; false leads, blind alleys and red
herrings – there is no recipe for finding one’s destiny. Nobody else can do it
for you.

2.
Quest

After seeking, the genius recognises
what it is that he is meant to do (or, meant to attempt): this is his Quest. Now
he has to choose – does he embrace his Destiny and accept the Quest? – Or does
he refuse? Only he can decide; and he will inevitably decide: the decision is
unavoidable.

3.
Illumination

After prolonged effort – months,
years, a decade or more: Eureka
moment – Illumination is achieved: the thing is done! (Eureka means something like “I have found it!” and is attributed to
Archimedes in his bath.)

The experience accumulated, the skills gained, the
understanding achieved during the Quest at last come together and the
breakthrough is made. A textbook example would be the English architect Michael
Ventris (1922-1956). Ventris was plagued by ill-health as a child (he also
suffered from night-blindness and extreme short-sightedness) but was blessed
with an ability to learn languages. He met the archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans
(1851-1941) on a school trip to the Royal Academy in London in 1936, when
Ventris was 14. Evans held up some Cretan tablets, written in Linear B script,
declaring that nobody could decipher this. Ventris dedicated the rest of his
life to cracking Linear B. Ventris finally succeeded in 1952, after which he
was reported to lack a sense of purpose. He died in a night time car crash in
1956, aged 34.[53]

Of course there are other phases coming after Illumination –
for instance the Illumination must be communicated to others; but beyond a
certain minimal effort at recording, reproducing and revealing, effective
communication is often ‘in the lap of the gods’ – and beyond the scope of
purposive activities of the genius. Then the Illumination must be understood,
considered, implemented, and so on.

The usual life of an Endogenous personality is in stark
contrast to that of a Conscientious person, helping us to identify who is
closer-to and who is further from genius. The Conscientious personality is
driven by external social perceptions – he is attuned to peer pressure, he
accepts peer evaluations, and may work hard on problems and jobs which are
derived from the social milieu.

The Conscientious personality has not chosen his problem;
more exactly his problem does not derive from inner sources. He is motivated to
act – but by other people, not by trying to solve his own ‘problem.’ The
Conscientious personality has no sense of being on a track of Destiny; he does
not ‘own’ the problem he is working-on. That line of work may be adopted from
obedience, or duty – or as a matter of expediency (e.g. for status, or money,
or to get sex). But when a line of work ceases to be externally required, or is
externally discouraged, or becomes inexpedient then it will be abandoned.

From this it is clear that the Conscientious personality is
not suited to a genius, is un-original and unlikely to lead to breakthroughs.
He has the drive to do something in the world; but that something does not
derive from within him, and therefore does not mobilize his full inner
resources. And his motivation will fail when times are tough – he will not push
through discouragements.

In contrast to the externally-orientated Conscientious
personality, the Contemplative personality is focused upon the inner world. The
mind’s eye is turned inward; and the Contemplative personality is meditative;
occupied by thoughts, fantasies, speculations ...

However, the contemplative personality is not creative but ...
contemplative. For a Contemplative, ‘action’ is meditative – understanding,
experience, the observation of the transcendental such as truth, beauty,
virtue, unity... this is what provides the greatest satisfaction.

The Contemplative personality is a dream-er, not a do-er.
Therefore, the Contemplative will not summon the long-term, stubborn
determination required to do genius-type creative work; the Quest to keep
pushing and pushing at a problem until it yields to Illumination – then to communicate
the outcome.

The Contemplative personality has the kind of autonomy of ‘public
opinion’ which is necessary to creativity – but lacks motivation towards
actions, lacks the ‘drive’ to solve a problem – instead he is content to
contemplate perceived reality rather than to re-conceptualize reality.

Chapter Nine

The Shaman
versus the Head Girl

Power, Pre-eminence, Personality

In considering the nature of genius,
it is not possible to define it in terms of a single variable – but it requires
several factors: the three Ps – 1. Power, 2. Pre-eminence, and 3. Being
associated with a Personality.

1.Power

Genius is a form of power. It is indeed
a new source of power that adds to human capability. An analogy would be that
genius is like discovering a new supply of fuel – a new forest, coal seam or
oil field. This new power can be used constructively, or destructively – for
tools or for weapons; and a weapon can be used for legitimate defence or for
malicious torture.

Genius is somewhat like a
local reorganization of reality to create new capability or efficiency or
effect, the insights and theory necessary for such a reorganization, or a technology
or tool that enables such a reorganization.

But if the primary reality of genius is a new source of
power, the secondary effect is to redistribute power – specifically to
concentrate power around the results of genius (not necessarily around the
genius himself, but concentrate power around the product of genius). But it
should be noticed that the tendency is for this power to diffuse and disseminate
– so that the consequences of genius typically spread much more widely than the
situation or society in which the originating genius dwelt.

For example, technologies such as the architectural arch
(inventor unknown) spread rapidly and widely across Europe and Asia Minor. The
opposite situation, when a breakthrough is confined to the originating group,
is rare but does sometimes happen; one example is Greek Fire (inventor unknown)
– which was a substance used as a deadly incendiary weapon by the Byzantine
Empire, that could continue burning even while floating on water – the secret
recipe for which has never been discovered.

2.Pre-eminence

The power of genius is associated
with pre-eminence. A genius must also be pre-eminent in his field, must be a
person of high ability. Thus, it is not genius when a person is of mediocre
ability but merely has power conferred upon him, or has a large effect, but by
accident.

3. Personal

Genius is personal; that is, it
originates in a specific person. The power and pre-eminence of a genius must
also be derived from within themselves, must originate from the person – and
not merely from his position in a system or institution or from headship of a
team (or from some other person – as when somebody else’s work is
appropriated).

The Shaman

So, if we want a useful metaphor;
the power of the genius is like that of the shaman, in contrast to that of the
chief. The power of the genius is like that of German sociologist Max Weber’s
(1864-1920) ‘Charismatic’ in contrast to the ‘Bureaucrat’[54]
who then administers the society which the Charismatic (the one with the gifts
to make a cold world seem warm) has founded. The genius may impress her
teachers at school, but she is not going to be made Head Girl.

The shaman comparison is, perhaps, the most useful. Now, the
category of shaman is a modern, Western conceptualization which unifies
disparate figures found in a wide range of tribal situations and from different
historical times. The term was originally Siberian and this may link culturally
to Amerindian examples (including among Eskimos/Inuit, through classic ‘Red
Indians’/ Native Americans; to Amazonians and Patagonians); but shamans are
also instanced among the Bushmen of the Kalahari desert in Africa and
Aborigines in Australia; and indeed wherever there is an animistic, or simple
totemistic (where an animal totem is worshipped and sacrificed) religion. The
shaman lives in a world dominated by spirits, everything in the world has its
own spirit and that spirit must be appeased through ritual. He has the ability
to enter the spirit world, negotiate with the spirits, and so improve the life
of the tribe through healing or ensuring good hunting.[55]

As such, despite the many fair points made by revisionists which
tend to suggest that the whole area of shamans is so vague and confused that it
would be better to dispense with the term; we believe it does have value. The
key point is that shamans were unexpected figures for anthropologists – found
in some types of simple society; but apparently either completely absent from
Western societies – or else hidden so deeply as to be undetectable by official
investigators. So anthropologists might have expected to find priests,
analogous to the already known priests of the Western, Middle Eastern and Far
Eastern societies – but shamans were not priests. A new category was needed.

What do shamans do? They are called upon to deal with
exceptional situations – situations where there is no traditional guidance, or
where the traditional guidance has been tried and found to be ineffective. Such
situations could include some types of illness, when and where to move for
better hunting, what to do about threats from predators or other tribes, ‘legal’
judgement in difficult cases – many types of advice and guidance,
interpretation and prophecy.

To do this, shamans use altered states of consciousness – trance
states of various types or visionary dreams – during which shamans contact the
underlying spirit world for information and prediction, or to intervene and
change things. In a nutshell, shamans are believed to be able to come into
contact with a deeper level of reality than the everyday – and that is the
source of their abilities – and their societal role.

So, shamans are highly creative persons – and therefore we
would expect that they would show the Psychoticism-like traits of high
creativity; and this seems to be confirmed by anthropological accounts. Shamans
usually emerge from an early age of life – either childhood or teens; the
shaman is either marked from an early age as being different, or else goes
through a (typically) traumatic experience of illness, accident or some other
stress, which changes them permanently. Thus, shamans are seen as flawed,
damaged people who also (because of this, not despite it) have special gifts.[56]
They are the ‘wounded healers’ as the Dutch Catholic priest Fr. Henri Nouwen
(1932-1996) put it.[57]

The shaman is usually a man – usually not socially
integrated, usually lives somewhat apart, may be unfriendly – a person feared
and respected rather than loved and cherished. Often the shaman is unmarried,
without known children – someone who hands on his social role by apprenticeship
rather than founding a lineage. Someone who does not work, but is supported by
payments for services and charity/protection money – at least he does not do
work as it applies to the rest of the tribe – hunting gathering, agriculture,
warfare, child care.[58]

It would obviously help if the shaman was more-than-usually
intelligent as well as more-than-usually creative – but it is probable that
these nomadic, simple hunter-gatherer societies have not been selected for
higher intelligence over hundreds of years – as have some of the more stable
and more complex agricultural societies (as we will see later).

So the objective intelligence of real life shamans may have
been relatively lower than what Europeans of recent generations would have
considered to be average. However, it is likely that shamans were relatively
highly intelligent by the standards of their people.

But it is not only the exceptional intelligence that sets
the shaman apart – rather it is the different cognitive style: the shaman
approaches problems differently, or creatively as we would say – he does not
apply the usual, traditional, high status or socially sanctioned rules or
practices; but instead generates his unpredictable answers using quite
different processes and procedures.

And this is something that the shaman cannot help doing: he
is made that way, he is called to a role. The shaman is probably an Endogenous
personality; he embodies that power which comes from high ability combined with
high creativity, and it is this which enables him to serve a crucial social
function in certain rare but important situations. Most of the time he is not
wanted, scary, chaotic, nasty, a nuisance, a parasite – but there are
situations when he is needed. And it is for these situations that the shaman is
protected by the rest of the tribe.

This, then, is the same kind of power the genius has: the
shaman can be considered an example of the ‘local genius’.

The Head Girl

As already mentioned, a comparison,
or anti-comparison, with genius is the ‘Head Girl.’

The first issue is simply this word ‘Girl.’ Genius tends to
more common in males. There are a number of reasons for this:

1.Women’s intelligence is more bunched towards
the mean than male intelligence, meaning there are more intelligence outliers
among men.

2.Adult men probably have a moderately
higher average IQ score than women (perhaps one third of a standard deviation
higher) – which (like the wider standard deviation of male IQ) also translates
to a more substantial proportion of men at the very highest levels of
intelligence.[59]

3.In surveys, men are nearly always rated
higher than women in average Psychoticism; and people with high levels of
Psychoticism are much more likely to be men than women (the distribution of
Psychoticism is positively-skewed in most studies – that is most people have
low levels of P, and only a small proportion have high levels). We would
interpret this sex difference as partly being due to higher rates of
psychopathy/ ‘psychopathic personality disorder’ in men; but partly also an aspect
of the more creative, Endogenous, personality type.[60]

It is noticeable that girls’ crazes tend to be more
socially-inflected and less abstract (e.g. princesses, fairies, clothes,
ponies); and this follows through to adult life, and to the subjects of major
achievement for women. The highest frequency of genius-level, or near-genius
level, achievement among women is focused on the most social and human aspects
of the arts and sciences – and much rarer in abstract areas. For instance,
there are many and well known women novelists in the front rank (notably Jane
Austen and George Eliot) – the novel being the most ‘social’ of art forms. And
in science, the highest achievements of women are in the human sciences rather
than the physical sciences – and within biology women have been very prominent
in social areas like primatology (e.g. Jane Goodall, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy) and
anthropology (e.g. Ruth Benedict, Jane Jacobs).

It is a tenet of feminist ‘scholarship’ that there were many
women geniuses who were neglected because they were women; and a large part of
feminist scholarship has been dedicated to raising awareness of women geniuses.
That there are indeed women geniuses is clear – examples abound, especially in
literature; but we do not think feminist scholarship of the past fifty years has
come up with a single ‘neglected’ example of a major woman genius.

Instead there has been a combination of the pretence that
real women geniuses were ‘previously neglected’ until feminism came along; plus
the hyping of women non-geniuses (such as Hildegard of Bingen as a composer and
spiritual writer, the DNA scientist Rosalind Franklin, and playwright Aphra
Benn). But Feminist scholarship has failed to discover any real women geniuses,
because there have been relatively few.

The ‘Head Girl’ is thus even more problematic in terms of
genius. The stereotypical Head Girl is an all-rounder: performs extremely well
in all school subjects and has a very high ‘Grade Point Average’ as it is
termed in the USA. She is excellent at sports, Captaining all the major teams.
She is also pretty, popular, sociable and well-behaved.

The Head Girl will probably be a big success in life, in
whatever terms being a big success happens to be framed (she will gravitate
towards such aspects of life) – so she might in some times and places make a
good marriage and do a great job of raising a family; in another time and place
she might go to a top-notch college and get a top-notch job – and pursue a
glamorous and infertile lifestyle of ‘serial monogamy’; with desirable mates.

But the Head Girl is not, cannot be, a creative genius. The
genius is pretty much everything the Head Girl is not. He (or she) is lop-sided
in his abilities – truly excellent at some things or maybe just one thing, he
is either hopeless or bored by many others. He won’t work hard for long periods
at things he does not want to do. He will not gravitate to the prestige areas
of life and cannot, or will not, do the networking necessary to get-on.

The Head Girl can never be a creative genius because she
does what other people want by the standards they most value. She will work
harder and at a higher standard in doing whatever it is that social pressure
tells her to do – and she will do this by whatever social standards prevail,
only more thoroughly. Meanwhile the creative genius will do what he does
because he must.

The Head Girl will not want to alienate potentially powerful
allies. Meanwhile the creative genius is indifferent or hostile to the opinions
of others so long as he knows he is right.

The Head Girl is great to have around, everybody thinks she
is wonderful. Meanwhile the creative genius is at best a person who divides
opinion, strongly, in both directions – at worst often a signed-up member of
the awkward squad.

The vulnerable genius

The proper social role of the highly
able Endogenous personality is not as leader. Indeed, the Endogenous
personality should be excluded from leadership as he will tend to lack the
desire to cooperate with or care for the feelings of others. His role should be
as an intuitive/ inspired ‘adviser’ of rulers.

Adviser-of-rulers is a term which should be taken to include
various types of prophet, shaman, genius, wizard, hermit, and holy fool – the
Socrates of the early Platonic dialogues is an historical example, as is
Diogenes, the Cynic, of Sinope (c.412-323 BC), who lived in a barrel and is
supposed to have snubbed Alexander the Great (without being punished), or even
the Fool character in Shakespeare plays.

These are extremes; but the description of Endogenous
personality and of an ‘inner orientation’ also applies to most historical
examples of creative genius. The Endogenous personality – therefore – does not
(as most men) seek primarily for social, sexual or economic success; instead
the Endogenous personality wants to live by his inner imperatives.

The way it is supposed-to-work, the ‘deal’, the ‘social
contract’; is that the Endogenous personality, by his non-social orientation,
is working for the benefit of society as a whole; at the cost of his not
competing in the usual status competitions within that society. His ‘reward’ is
simply to be allowed, or – better – actively enabled, to have the minimal
necessary sustenance, psychological support (principally being ‘left alone’ and
not harassed or molested; but ideally sustained by his family, spouse, patron
or the like) to be somehow provided-with the time and space and wherewithal to
do his work and communicate the outcome. For the Endogenous personality, this
is its own reward.

In return, the Endogenous personality should not expect
(although he might, by chance, get) social esteem, wealth, or sexual success.
Often, he may need to be highly solitary, secluded, ascetic, perhaps celibate.
He should not seek, and should try not to accept, leadership positions, or
administrative responsibilities.

Michael A. Woodley makes
the point that individuals who can properly be classified as geniuses necessarily
have brains that are wired differently from normal; they are programmed to
focus on their destined tasks and therefore may be unable to deal with the small
details of day to day affairs.[61] For
instance, Einstein once got lost not far from his home
in Princeton, New Jersey. He went into a shop and said, ‘Hi, I’m Einstein, can
you take me home please?’ He could not drive a car, and many tasks and chores that
most people take for granted were beyond him.[62]

Woodley’s conclusion
flows from the idea of genius as a group-selected trait adapted to be an asset
to other people. In sum, the potential genius needs to be looked after; because
in terms of negotiating the complexities of human society he is likely to be vulnerable
and fragile. The corollary of which is that when geniuses are not looked
after, they are less likely to fulfil their potential, and everybody
loses.

For instance, the American
reclusive poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was ‘managed’ by Colonel T.W.
Higginson; Jane Austen (1775-1817) flourished in the obscurity of her family
and the critic and social philosopher John Ruskin (1819-1900) was sheltered and
nurtured by his parents, then a cousin. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) was
looked after by his brother Friars; Genetics-founder Johann Mendel (1822-1884)
was secluded in a monastery; Pascal (1623-1662) was looked after by his
aristocratic French family.[63] Plus many
another genius was sustained by a capable wife – Kurt Gödel (1906-1978)
depended on his, older, wife Adele; and would only eat food prepared by her; so
that when she was hospitalized, Gödel literally starved.[64]

When there is a close-knit and
idealistic community, this may also do it – for example, the community of
mathematicians looked after Hungarian Paul Erdos (1913-1996), who never had a
home, possessed only the contents of a small suitcase, and camped-out at in the
house of one mathematics professor after another for decades, while
collaborating on research papers. The Indian genius mathematician Srinivasa
Ramanujan (1887-1920) was discovered and protected by the Cambridge Professors
Hardy and Littlewood – although he died, weakened by his inability to eat
adequately due to Brahmin dietary restrictions that were too rigorous for
English life.

The unfortunate William Sidis
(1898-1944), an American child prodigy of the early twentieth century and
reputed to have the highest ever recorded IQ score; was exploited and exposed
to social stresses rather than protected by his parents (his father was a
Harvard professor of Psychology). Sidis was a sensitive and awkward man who had
to survive in a hostile and mocking world; so his creative achievements –
although greater than commonly supposed – were limited, and indeed largely
unknown and unappreciated.[65]

The rise of bureaucracy

Modern society is dominated by ‘bureaucracy’,
that is by division of function, voting committees and formal procedures – rather
than by individual humans, close-knit and informal groups making personal
judgments.

This impersonality of bureaucracy,
the lack of individual autonomy and responsibility; seems to be a major factor
in the modern failure to look-after, but instead to neglect or even to
persecute, geniuses.

Furthermore, in itself, the rise
in bureaucracy – in academia and also more broadly – might be seen as further
evidence of the trend for decline in intelligence. There are a number of
complementary explanations for the rise in bureaucracy which would be congruent
with this theory.

1. Parasitism: Bureaucracy can be seen as a
parasite, growing at the expense of the host society. Some bureaucracy is necessary
as society becomes more complex and organizations become larger. However, the
abundance of wealth and resources created by industrialization has meant that
it is possible for a group of quite unnecessary people – e.g. micro-managing
and inefficiency-generating bureaucrats – to latch onto the host and even
persuade the host that they are necessary. Once attached to the host they
spread like a cancer because criticism of bureaucracy leads to further
‘regulatory’ bureaucracy to sort-out the bureaucracy. A more intelligent host
would realise that the bureaucracy was parasitic and would remove it – but once
the bureaucracy is large enough, then it will dominate all senior positions and
committees, and become impossible to excise. At that point, death of the host –
along with the parasite – becomes almost inevitable. [66]

2. Division of Labour: Bureaucracy
tends to involve an increasing division of labour and the assumption that the
decision of a committee will be superior to the (potentially corrupt) decision
of an individual. Such division and oversight functions would be more necessary
in a society with declining intelligence, because individual decisions would be
more prone to corruption and plain stupidity than in a more intelligent
society; and people in general would be less likely to trust individuals as
intelligence predicts trust.[67] Accordingly,
in the context of universities, for example, there would increasingly be a need
for more rigid and impersonal personnel selection in the form of requiring formal
qualifications achieved via rigid
criteria. In addition, bureaucracy includes breaking up a task into smaller
component functions coordinated in a hierarchical sequence. It takes less
intelligence to perform these smaller functions than the entire specialised
task. Thus, as society becomes less intelligent so greater bureaucracy is
required for even necessary bureaucracy to continue (or for parasitic
bureaucracy to continue to grow).

3. The Growth of Academia. As society has
become specialised, academia has grown enormously; initially from social need,
later from the parasitic growth of functionally redundant and ineffective
demands for certification – sustained by increasing state subsidies. As the
academic staffing of ever-more institutions expands many-fold, the
intellig-ence range of academics is likely to become far broader than it once
was, and the tail of less able academics comes to dominate numerically. In
addition, the population trend of declining intelligence will mean that even
the best academics will be less intelligent than a generation ago. As such, a
larger and more effective bureaucracy apparently becomes more necessary (or, at
least, desirable) to police and manage a less intelligent (and less
self-motivated) academia; which is likely to be increasingly corrupt,
incompetent and factious. In addition, we have seen that intelligence
correlates with ‘Intellect’, and universities have become far less
intellectual. Instead of acting primarily as a specialist intellectual
‘finishing school’, they train people – either partially or completely – for
various professions: solicitor, engineer, school teacher, government
administrator, private industry managers of many types, architect, accountant
etc. Until as recently as the 1970s, none of these required a degree – now they
do; as do a multitude of skilled manual jobs like pharmacy, physiotherapy,
nursing etc. This can be seen to herald a change in attitude. Universities were
primarily about training professionals which were originally priests, barristers
and physicians only – but the notion of ‘profession’ has been expanded a
hundredfold; and now a university degree is a pre-requisite for even
reasonably-paid jobs – unrelated to the actual needs of those jobs. This will
select for students who are better at attaining qualifications, at working in a
bureaucracy; hence the selection procedures favour those who are Conscientious
rather than geniuses.

4. The Only Means of Achievement. We have
seen that academic achievement is partly predicted by intelligence and partly
predicted by personality traits, especially Conscientiousness, which predicts
years spent in education at 0.55.[68] Accordingly,
in principle, someone can get into a good university via 1. The combination of very high intelligence but only moderate
Conscientiousness, 2. Very high Conscientiousness but only moderate
intelligence or 3. By scoring reasonably highly on both measures. Bureaucracy –
the keeping of records, planning, and adherence to formal procedures (the
qualities of a Conscientious person in many ways) – should be smaller, at any
given stage of complexity, the more intelligent (on average) is a given
society. This is because intelligence reflects a high functioning brain and
thus superior memory (swifter learning and less need to record things),
superior ability to solve any given problem (and so less need for formal
procedures and planning), and being more functionally pro-social and more
forward-thinking (meaning less conflict, less free-riding, more trust, and
fewer unforeseen problems to manage). Thus, as society becomes less intelligent
it can only maintain its achievement level through more Conscientious
behaviour: that is, through more bureaucracy.

But, whatever is behind the growth
in bureaucracy, whatever mixture of need and parasitism that might prevail in
any particular time and place, it leads to decision by committees of
bureaucrats who will implicitly be looking for people who will make good bureaucrats
and often who will make a university money in the relatively short term. They
will not want people who will upset the smooth functioning of the bureaucracy –
which genius types may well do – and they will be rigid in sticking to rules,
which geniuses won’t be. It will also be very difficult to punish bureaucrats
in voting committees for making a poor decision – for instance, rejecting a
person who later turns-out to be a genius in the field, and whose appointment
would therefore have eventually paid-off – as rejection was a collective
decision where they merely followed the rules; also the composition of the
decision-making committee is (typically) unstable and constantly changing. Moreover,
bureaucratic “sticking to the rules” will typically work against geniuses,
because bureaucrats usually have a black-and-white interest in qualifications,
grades and the like. This will be problematic for the genius, with his highly
narrow, lop-sided focus. (We have noted elsewhere that Newton, Einstein, Crick
and many another genius did not excel academically by formal criteria).

In sum, committees
do not look after geniuses – rather they ignore them, or persecute
them. It is likely no coincidence that English genius very suddenly
all-but disappeared in the era from about 1955-1980[69] in which
bureaucracy waxed dominant in national life – and nowadays geniuses are absent,
invisible, or fighting for survival against the forces of mass media,
committees, peer reviewers and other faceless officials.

This is sad for the geniuses;
perhaps fatal for our society.

Chapter Ten

Newton versus
Jung

To further illustrate the nature of
genius, it will be useful to explore two examples. The first is Sir Isaac
Newton (1642-1727); a genius, and one of the very greatest.[70]
The second is Carl Jung (1875-1961), who displayed aspects of genius; perhaps a
highly influential partial genius.[71]

Newton’s intellectual ability, his intelligence, was very
obviously stratospheric; so his personality becomes a source of fascination.
Hans Eysenck established that the high level creative personality type was
approximated by the trait of High Psychoticism, which we have already
discussed.

Newton’s biography reveals that he was an extreme example of
the Psychoticism trait. Psychoticism is important to genius because it
describes someone who is uninterested and uninfluenced by the normal human
concerns – which are essentially ‘other people.’ Most humans are social
animals, who see life through social spectacles, and who are motivated by the
desire for friends, sex, status, and so on. But not Newton. In his early and
most creative years, he simply wanted to be allowed to get on with his work.

As a child and young man of science he would spend nearly
all of his time alone, when in company he would be silent, he had essentially
no friends, formed no relationships with women, and made very little effort to
fit-in. Indeed as a boy his relationships with other boys tended to be
antagonistic and at times rather sadistic (Newton was not likeable).

Newton was taught Latin at school; and little else. In terms
of mathematics and science he was an autodidact. Whatever he did, he did
because he wanted to do it; and he did it at close to 100 per cent effort. Thus
in a year or so he went from knowing no mathematics to mastering the subject
and being among the best in the world; and then immediately went on to make
some of the greatest ever mathematical discoveries.

Newton’s own explanation of his achievement emphasized the
distinctive creative personality – he was asked how he made his discoveries and
gave such answers as ‘By thinking on it continually’ and ‘I keep the subject
constantly before me’.

Then he all-but dropped mathematics, and instead worked on one
area of physics after another – making major discoveries, then moving-on. This
may remind you of the ‘schoolboy crazes’ or obsessions, typical of some highly
intelligent young men.

Stories of Newton’s consuming focus abound – he would think
solidly for hour upon hour – sometimes standing lost in abstraction half way
down the stairs; forget to eat, forget to sleep; forget that he had visitors.
For years he seldom left his college, almost never left Cambridge. In all of
human history there can have been very few (and perhaps nobody of Newton’s
astonishing intelligence) who gave such intense and sustained concentration to
whatever problem they were working on.

And while Newton’s academic performance was good, it was not
amazing, and was somewhat erratic. It seems he performed badly in his BA
examination – which was a viva voce disputation;
needing to go on to a second round of questions (rather than passing straight
away). This was regarded as somewhat disgraceful.

His methods were highly intuitive, reasoning from a
relatively small base of axioms and principles, building out from them, making
predictions and testing his ideas against general observations. This can be
contrasted with the method typical of highly intelligent and conscientious un-creative people – who read widely, learn
many facts, and then try to apply other-people’s solutions to problems.

But Newton, the autodidact, worked things through for
himself; thought things through using only those facts and principles he
trusted. From this; originality follows quite naturally and without being
deliberately sought.

It is clear that Newton’s solitary, wilful and autonomous
personality; his un-empathic, un-conscientious, anti-social and eccentric ways
– in sum his high Psychoticism traits – were as necessary a part of his supreme
genius as was ultra-high intelligence.

Let us now contrast Newton with Jung. Carl Jung is unusual
among probable-geniuses, in that he was dishonest about his own work and its
implications.

That Jung was a near-genius we think is correct; he made
numerous discoveries and conceptual breakthroughs – and he is an unseen but
pervasive influence behind vast areas of modern culture including psychology,
psychiatry, therapy and (especially) that vast and vague phenomenon called the
New Age movement (almost everything about the New Age has a Jungian lineage – even
when this is not generally known or acknowledged).

But that Jung was a thoroughly-dishonest and deceptive man
is something equally undeniable. Jung was never plain and honest when that was
inexpedient – Jung was not driven by a pure pursuit of truth; because truth was
readily and repeatedly sacrificed when the consequences were unwanted by Jung.
(Eysenck regarded lying as typical of the high Psychoticism personality.)

He craved respectability as a Professor, psychiatrist,
scholar, scientist – and would trim his published views to ensure this. He
wanted wealth, status, admiration – and patients were charmed, seduced,
strung-along and generally exploited to ensure this. Jung wanted to be regarded
as an unworldly sage – but worked to create an organization dedicated to his
own self-promotion. He apparently had many sexual relationships with his
patients and trainees right into old age; and had a long-term live-in mistress
who functioned as a second wife (while being unmentioned in his autobiography –
he also used his personal magnetism to maintain a household of handmaidens to
dote upon and serve him).

The point is that Jung’s many compromises, deceptions,
evasions, and lies are so consistently dedicated to his own comfort,
convenience and gratification that the picture is one of a highly charming and
dominant; but heartless, manipulative and selfish psychopath – typical traits
of high Psychoticism, but which interfere with creative achievement. Furthermore,
Jung experienced a significant psychotic episode (his ‘confrontation with the
unconscious, from 1913) characterized by hallucinations and probably delusions.

In sum, Jung – like Newton – exhibited some aspects of the
dark side of Psychoticism.

Jung is, in several respects, the precursor of the
postmodern intellectual – the ‘clever silly’ who espouses an illogical,
incoherent, dogmatic, opaquely expressed, and overly complex idea. Doing this
helps him to display his intelligence – because the idea is complex and hard to
understand, making him seem profound to silly or emotional people – even if the
idea is nonsense on closer inspection. Also, if the idea gives people hope,
then he will come across as altruistic, further boosting his status.[72]

But this could be put aside as mere hypocrisy – and that is
something of which we are all guilty (it would be hypocritical to pretend
otherwise). But Jung’s dishonesty went even deeper than that, to invade his
primary achievement. Because Jung’s work is incoherent at the very deepest
level – and this incoherence has afflicted his legacy. And this incoherence was
not the result of confusion, but the result of dishonesty.

An example is the idea of synchronicity; which has become an
extremely influential cultural idea, as a buzz-word and a vague concept – but
which was deployed by Jung in a way that makes no sense. And this incoherence
is not due to misunderstanding Jung, but comes directly from Jung’s written
contradictory accounts and evasions of the implications of his own insight.

British philosopher Colin Wilson (1931-2013) exposed this in
his marvellously insightful short study: Lord
of the Underworld: Jung and the Twentieth Century (1984); especially the
chapter “The Sage of Kusnacht”, where Wilson goes through the writings on
synchronicity with a fine-toothed comb, and tries to pin down what Jung really
believed, or meant – and comes up against a mass of obfuscation and
self-refutation: of giving with one hand and taking back with the other.[73]

This kind of contradiction and vagueness vitiates Jung’s
legacy and is a direct consequence of his mixed motivations. It demonstrates
that genius depends on dedication to the work, and any failures in this regard
will detract from the level of achievement.

Jung’s last recorded words from his death bed seem
appropriate: ‘Let’s have a really good red wine tonight.’ The final statement
of a man whose personal gifts were astonishingly great – but who consistently
and successfully deployed them for his own comfort, convenience and glory.

Chapter Eleven

The
Evolution of Genius

But how did human societies evolve
such that genius – which is at least a-social and perhaps seems anti-social,
and often indifferent to reproduction – could manifest itself? On the face of
it, genius seems like something that could not happen.

In biological, that is evolutionary, terms – and
following-up the insights of Michael A. Woodley; we regard genius is an altruistic trait.

Altruistic in this sense means that – on average, in the
environment where and when genius evolved – being a genius will tend to reduce
the genius’s own personal reproductive success, while genius-caused inventions
and other breakthroughs will usually substantially enhance the reproductive
success of the group of which the genius is a member. But this genius-caused
enhancement of group survival and growth includes unrelated group members, and
group members who have not helped the genius – meaning that kin selection and
mutual assistance/ reciprocity (the main posited evolutionary causes of
altruism) do not seem to apply.

That is, being a genius on average reduces the chances of reproducing successfully, and reduces the
probable number of viable children – but the activities of a genius will tend
to increase chances of survival of his group, or expand the numbers of people
in the group.

Many geniuses have had no known offspring, and statistical
studies have indicated a considerably lower-than-average number of children for
the geniuses of history.[74] And
however imprecise or subjective these studies may be: certainly there is no significant
evidence to suggest that geniuses have on average an increased number of
offspring – which would be needed to explain the occurrence of genius by
ordinary, individual-level selection.

Thus, in terms of survival and reproduction, being a genius is bad for the genius and
good for his group.

Biological altruism does not (or does not necessarily)
correspond with social altruism, or an altruistic personality- i.e. ‘helping
people’ – because the genius’s contribution to his community is via his work.

Indeed, it is characteristic of the behaviour of a genius
that he will protect the conditions necessary for his work, even when this goes
against usual and expected socially altruistic behaviour. The genius may
therefore be solitary – may indeed be selfish, may not marry or have a family,
may not be a good neighbour. But he is selfish not really for his own benefit –
not for money or status – but primarily for the work: selfish to enable him
better to do (or to do at all) what it is that he does. He is selfish in
pursuit of his Destiny, and that Destiny is for the benefit of others.

Some geniuses are nice, many are nasty – but that is not the
point. The point is that the genius feels his first (or a very high)
responsibility is to do his utmost to create and sustain the best conditions he
needs for his work, and to do that work, and communicate that work. He feels
his duty is to follow his Destiny. And this motivation comes above the desire
to help other people.

(If asked, a genius might truthfully claim to be working for
the long-term benefit of his general group – even when this was at the cost of
failing to be helpful here and now, in the immediate- and short-term; to his
immediate family, friends and colleagues.)

Thus it is quite possible, indeed it is quite normal, for
biological altruism at the group level to go with personal selfishness; and for
personal un-selfishness to be anti-altruistic, and to damage the reproductive
interests of the group. Dean Simonton has found that many geniuses – most
obviously Newton, but also many others such as Einstein – were extremely
difficult people.[75] By
contrast, one can imagine a selfless and kindly person who might assist an
individual, out of utter kindness, who was part of a group that was effectively
at war with the group of which she was a part. Altruism and being nice: two
very different things.

The Paradox of the Endogenous personality is that despite
their relative indifference to socio-sexual imperatives; we believe that
geniuses have (in evolutionary terms) evolved to serve the group.

The Paradox is that only an inner-orientated personality can
be sufficiently independent of the social consensus so as to be able to change
the social consensus – when that is needed.

Group selection of the Endogenous personality.

In effect, and on average, the Endogenous
personality sacrifices his own differential reproductive success – including
his inclusive fitness, that is, the reproductive success of his closer kin – to
favour the reproductive success of the group. By this group, we usually mean
the genius’s ethnic or local group.

Australian biologist Frank Salter’s detailed mathematical
modelling based on population genetic data has shown that, although there is a
social dimension to ethnic identification, the core of ethnic group membership
is genetic. Ethnic groups are breeding populations, and a random member of one
ethnic group will have more genetically in common with a random co-ethnic than
he will with a random member of another ethnic group. As such, there are two
ways to pass one one’s genes: directly (through having children) or indirectly
(by abetting one’s kin in having children).[76]

This is called inclusive fitness or kin selection – and it
means that what looks like altruism at the individual level may be selfishness
at the genetic level – indeed, individual altruism is what makes possible
genetic selfishness. It works in such a way that the closer the relationship of
those who are benefitted, the more powerful is this mechanism – so kin
selection is the presumed mechanism that generates the close cooperation and
self-sacrifice of social insects such as bees and ants, and most aspects of the
‘clannishness’ of families and closely-genetically-related humans.

A further theoretically possible mechanism for kin selection
would be when an individual does not himself reproduce but substantially
assists the reproduction of his genetic relatives, as might happen if an uncle
without children gave a lot of help to his nieces and nephews, and thereby
indirectly promoted the reproduction of the genes he shares with his brother or
sister. However, there is no evidence to suggest that geniuses help their
genetic relatives any more than non-geniuses, and indeed the genius is likely
to do less (not more) than average to
assist his family – given that he is so devoted to his destined work and
problem-solving or otherwise creative activities.

But group selection may be less direct than this; because
genius is enhancing the reproductive success of the whole group in a way that
typically benefits those who are only distantly related, to the genius – as
much or more than the work of a genius benefits close genetic relations (and
the family of the genius may also be losing resources by helping to support
him).

The ethnic group is merely a highly extended kin network and
the genius has no interest in sex or even kindness to his near kin, it would
make sense that his evolutionary strategy would favour more distant kin. The
group are – in broad terms – an extended family; and the growth of the group
may indeed favour the kin of the genius – but this expansion would not
necessarily benefit close kin more than remote relations – and the close kin
typically have to bear the costs of supporting the genius .

So if we assume that the genius is an evolved adaptation for
the good of the group; then what function does the Endogenous personality
perform? In a nutshell, we suggest that
the function of the genius is to solve problems which arise from inter-group
conflict – and the benefits a genius provides are typically shared among
the whole group among whom he dwells.

Just as the normal situation of individual selection arises
from conflict between individuals, so the less common situation of group
selection arises from competition between groups – especially when the group is
cohesive and the reproductive success of individuals depends upon the survival
and expansion of the group.

(Note: There is not, at present, a general and accepted
mechanism to explain many or most instances of group selection – although there
are some specific suggestions for specific situations. We are therefore arguing
that group selection is primarily responsible for evolving the Endogenous
personality – but we make no general claims here about how exactly this group
selection is operating, at a mechanistic or process level.)

Group conflict and group selection

Group conflict includes situations
in which the individual is dependent on the group, and when the group is under
extreme pressure from the ‘environment.’ This is a situation in which only the
group as a group (and not individuals
nor extended families), can survive in a harsh environment, especially in
competition with other groups in a similar situation.

The ‘environment’ includes both natural and social
environments. Natural environmental pressure could be extreme temperatures (hot
or cold), marked seasonality of food availability, or predation from large
animals when these problems can only be solved by the group (e.g. the clan or tribe)
cooperating and working together, and cannot be solved by individuals or
families pursuing their own specific genetic interests. Social environmental
pressure could include group versus group conflicts (‘warfare’) driven by
factors like competition for land or other finite resources.

In the face of a potentially fatal social problem an
individual with the Endogenous personality offers the possibility (but of
course there is no guarantee) of a
novel ‘breakthrough’ answer. For instance, in the face of the prospect of annihilation
by the environment, or by another group – a situation in which the group is
doomed unless there is a
breakthrough; perhaps some new technology, some socially-unifying art or form
of religion, some way of extracting more resources per unit area, some new
weapon or defence. For this kind of creative
solution, a genius is needed.

If a whole society was composed of genius-type people, it
could not function – indeed it would not be a society. But if it altogether
lacked Endogenous personalities, then it would only grow very slowly (perhaps
by incremental trial and error – which doesn’t always yield an answer to novel
problems) and would be at greater risk of being wiped-out by natural forces or
group competition.

Thus, we can conceive of roughly two kinds of genius. The
scientific-technical genius will increase the chances of a sci-tech
breakthrough, or a novel theory that will lead to these. For example,
inventions such as the spade, bow and arrow, wheel, plough, railway, radio…
these are assumed to be products of sci-tech geniuses; and their value is
obvious. This kind of genius may help either group survival or even help to
expand the group of which he is part.

By contrast, an artistic, philosophical or religious genius
will implicitly aid group cohesion – we term these cohesion geniuses. Improved cohesion could therefore be the
explanation for the occurrence of artistic genius, or the genius of a
storyteller – and also an explanation for religious geniuses who invent new
interpretations, beliefs, practices, rituals, stories, scriptures, priesthoods
or other forms of institution… that have the consequence of binding-together
the group.

Improved cohesion from a religious innovation might then
help to enhance growth of the group of religious adherents, perhaps the growth
of new forms of political organization, and these might result in the increase
of (for example) economic activity or military prowess.

Consider the difference between the Kalahari Bushmen in
Africa, and Australian Aborigines. These are broadly similar hunter gatherer
societies with a similar level of technology and a similar type of environment.
The main social difference is in group size – the Aborigines have significantly
larger groups, which means that they cohere better and could assemble larger
fighting forces. And the larger Aborigine groups are based around their Totemic
religion, which is more fixed and more complex than the fluid, imprecise
Animism of the Kalahari Bushmen. Animism is the belief that all living things
have souls or spirits and these need to be appeased. Totemism develops this
belief, and involves the view that there is one primary source in nature which
provides the basis of human life in one’s tribe. The tribe then tends towards
worshipping this specific animal – or whatever it may be – to a greater extent
than others. Indeed, regular rituals bring the tribe together as they sacrifice
the animal in question.[77]

The Aborigine religion both requires and benefits from a
more elaborate social structure of authority and learning of the legends – which
must be transmitted through the generations by songs and chants. Presumably (of
course there is no direct evidence) some (or more than one) Aborigine religious
genius created this Totemic social structure – and the group who adopted it was
rewarded by improved cohesion, which enabled them to out-grow and displace
rival groups[78].

This is conjectural, albeit plausible – it may or may not be
historically true; but our point is that somebody at some time made these
religious innovations and enabled larger scale and more powerful social
cohesion – and this person could be termed a genius (albeit on a local scale)
And perhaps many other examples of genius could be regarded as making creative
breakthroughs of a cohesion-generating type.

More obvious are the motivational and organizational ‘cohesion
geniuses’ who expand the geographical territory of their group – the geniuses
of military defence or conquest; the likes of Alexander the Great, Julius
Caesar, Admiral Lord Nelson.

We would also expect different populations to produce
differing levels of genius, due to differences in local and regional
environments. This is something that has been highlighted by Charles Murray in
his book, Human Accomplishment.[79]

Murray finds that Europeans are behind the overwhelming
majority of important scientific and artistic accomplishments between Classical
times and 1950. Northeast Asians are in second place, but their contribution is
relatively small. This is despite the fact that Richard Lynn has found that
Northeast Asians have significantly higher average intelligence than Europeans,
outscoring them by around 5 IQ points.[80]

Our proposed answer to the relative lack of genius among
Northeast Asians is that they lack the Endogenous personality; presumably from
having had a different historical environment than Europeans – an environment
which imposed less intense and less sustained group versus group competition, and therefore less powerful group selection for creative innovation (i.e.
natural selection for one group to gain an advantage over rival groups).
Another possibility is that the environment of Northeast Asia was harsher,
leading to stronger selection against Psychoticism and less genetic diversity
as survivors would need to be very strongly adapted to the environment, leading
to intelligence being bunched towards the mean. Accordingly, the chance
occurrence of outlier intelligence combined with moderately high Psychoticism
would be less than in Europe.[81]
But this is a topic for future research.

Chapter Twelve

The Rise and
Fall of Genius

The rise of genius

So far, we have discussed possible
general mechanisms for the evolution of genius; and we have argued that genius
is the characteristic outcome of the Endogenous personality who is highly
self-motivated. But one of the most obvious and striking things about genius,
is that there used to be a lot of geniuses – and major geniuses – and now there
are very few.

The research in Human
Accomplishment by Charles Murray, which is broadly confirmed by others,[82]
indicates that genius in recent centuries has been essentially a phenomenon of
the European population, including the diaspora of Europeans to other parts of
the world. It seems that in Europe, and only in and around Europe and among its
diaspora population, were the conditions necessary for the evolution of the
Endogenous personality, who combines both very high general intelligence (g)
and the ‘inner’-orientated personality type.

The current evidence suggests that unusually high
intelligence but not the Endogenous
personality has also evolved in East Asia – indeed the intelligence is
probably even higher than in Europe. There are plausible historical scenarios
which explain how high intelligence can evolve by multi-generational,
individual-level natural selection which favours the reproductive success of
the most intelligent members of the population (assisted by sexual selection via assortative mating whereby the most
intelligent men and women tend to marry each other, and women in polygamous
societies sexually select for the higher status – and so usually more
intelligent – men). Gregory Clark has described this (in great detail) for
Europe, and Ron Unz (in outline) for China.[83]

But those aspects of adaptive high Psychoticism which are
essential to the Endogenous personality seem only to have evolved in Europe,
presumably due to the specific group selection factors. These could include
between-group competition in a harsh environment; but one that is not too harsh, such that psychoticism and
the chance occurrence of genius is all but eliminated. In addition, it is
likely that the Black Death of the fourteenth century, which killed up to half
of Europeans but around 80% of the serfs,[84]
provided a significant boost to European intelligence; since the most
intelligent classes and groups suffered the lowest mortality rates.

At any rate, in England and later elsewhere in Europe, and from
the Middle Ages onwards, there was a tremendous concentration of major,
world-historical geniuses, and of major breakthroughs; which came thick and
fast; and interacted in a synergistic fashion to trigger first an Agricultural
(or Agrarian), then an Industrial Revolution accelerating from about 1700 and
taking off about 1800. The result was a tremendous increase in agricultural
efficiency and production, and the advent of a new form of social organization
based on steam, iron and steel, machines, and transportation – which taken
altogether reduced mortality rates, especially child mortality, and enabled
rapid and massive population growth.

Our assumption – defended earlier in this book – is that
breakthroughs require geniuses, even when the identity of these geniuses is not
known or uncertain; as is often the case in agriculture.

Behind many of the breakthroughs of the modern world lies
the principle of ‘division of labour’ which was first articulated by the
Scottish philosopher Adam Smith (1723-1790). He recognized, described and
promoted something that had already begun to happen. Division of labour
entailed two things: that the work force should be subdivided to specialize in
their functions, and that these specialized functions could be coordinated
towards the final result. The result was – potentially – a massive increase in efficiency (output per unit of input) purely
resulting from a change of social organization. Smith’s example was a pin
factory, where he showed that dividing the task of pin making into specialized
functions and then coordinating these workers into a workshop or factory would
lead to more than a two-hundred-fold greater number of pins: from a few dozen pins per man per day, to several thousand pins.

This is the essence of that increased productivity which
defines the Industrial Revolution – more output for the same amount of input.
Indeed, in agriculture the productivity increase went even further, with more
production of food for less input of man-hours – meaning that, as well as
supporting an increasing population size, much of the previously farming
workforce was available to be redeployed into the new industries (indeed, they
were more or less forced into the new industries in order to survive).

In agriculture there was enclosure of the large, open
fields; effective crop rotations with new winter fodder plants (such as
turnips) to sustain larger flocks and herds of animals; the use of manuring and
liming to improve crop yields; the invention of selective animal breeding (i.e.
accelerated natural selection supervised by men) which yielded more meat, wool,
strength etc. from the same number of animals; and the invention of many new
tools and machines (often using metal instead of wood) enabling fewer men to do
more and a better standard of work.

We assume that each of these breakthroughs was enabled by
one or more geniuses; and the combination of these multiple geniuses and
breakthroughs was an increase in agricultural efficiency far beyond anything in
the history of the world. Some of the contributing geniuses probably included
people such as Coke of Norfolk, ‘Turnip’ Townsend (Charles, 2nd
Viscount Townshend, 1674-1738), Jethro Tull (1674-1741), Robert Bakewell
(1725-95) and many more.[85]

Increased food production partly enabled the Industrial
Revolution, and was also enabled by it – so there were breakthroughs in coal
mining (including division of labour and massive coordinated works),
transportation (canals, railways, roads), steam power, iron and steel
production – also international trade and great improvements in ship-building,
communication systems, and the Pax
Britannica of military strength (especially naval strength) to enable
international trade – which itself had the effect of increasing productivity by
specialization and coordination, as was first understood by the English
philosopher David Ricardo (1772-1823) in his ‘law of comparative advantage’.

The geniuses who contributed to the Industrial Revolution
are extremely numerous and better known than the Agrarians; a mere selection
would include the likes of Trevithic and Watt with the steam engine, Bessamer
(steel), Crompton (‘Mule’), Hargreaves (Spinning Jenny), engineers such as
George Stephenson, Telford, Macadam…

Indeed from the late Middle Ages and through the Renaissance
– especially from about 1600 and accelerating – genius was more and more
apparent in European sciences, art, music, literature, mathematics, philosophy…
almost everywhere. And this continued through into the twentieth century,
especially in the sciences – with an especially astonishing constellation of
geniuses in physics topped by Einstein.

The decline of genius

There are a number of reasons to
think that intelligence is in decline, and this has become more-and-more
evident from the middle of the twentieth century until it is now difficult to
deny – since there are very few acknowledged geniuses at all, and some fields
without any. This is despite a much larger population, and much better
facilities and opportunities.

It is not just the number of geniuses that have declined but
their quality – so, for example, in the late 1800s-early 1900s there was Clark
Maxwell, Einstein, Rutherford, Heisenberg, Schroedinger, Planck, Bohr, Dirac…
and so on and so forth – but a hundred years later there are only a few elderly
geniuses left. In biology/ biochemistry, which had its golden era as recently
as the middle twentieth century, there are now only a handful of elderly greats
left-over from those days – such as American James Watson, the co-discoverer of
DNA, and Sidney Brenner, the South African experimental geneticist.

The same picture can be seen even more starkly in classical
music – the nineteenth century had Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn,
Chopin, Debussy, Berlioz, Weber, Verdi, Wagner, Mahler, Brahms… the list just
goes on and on. In the early twentieth century there were a few leftovers in
Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Richard Strauss and then… nothing.

In English poetry from the fifteenth century right up into
the middle twentieth century there were probably always several, sometimes
many, genius poets – but since the deaths of Phillip Larkin, John Betjeman and
Robert Graves in 1984-5 there are none.

Such impressions are confirmed by systematic studies of
exceptional individuals and major innovations, and throughout Europe and the
European diaspora – there is a picture of decline – initially decline in per capita rates of genius production,
followed by decline in absolute rates; and accompanied by a decline in the
magnitude of geniuses.[86]

Why should this be? If the Endogenous personality is the
genius type, and is composed mainly of intelligence and personality, the main
explanation is likely to be declining average intelligence, with a downshift in
the distribution of geniuses, and (because of the properties of near-normal
distribution curves) a very substantial decline in the number of people with
very high intelligence.

And indeed that is exactly what we find: a large and rapid
decline in general intelligence, insofar as intelligence can be measured
objectively (not relatively).

Decline of intelligence due to the most intelligent having the fewest
children

Since general intelligence has a
high heritability (approximately 80 per cent), the well-known fact that the
most intelligent people (especially the most intelligent women) have the fewest
children – in other words the inverse correlation between intelligence and
fertility – must tend to reduce average intelligence over the generations.

So, IQ test scores, and proxy measures of intelligence such
as educational level, years of education, social class, income; are strongly
negatively associated with fertility among women, and to a lesser extent among
men. In other words, overall, the more intelligent the woman, the fewer
children she will bear.[87]

This is particularly significant in the modern world where
the childhood mortality rate has declined from more than half of children dying
before adulthood (even higher among the least intelligent) to about one per cent
in Western countries. In other words, nearly all children who are born will now
survive to adulthood, and premature mortality rates have become so low as to be
almost irrelevant at the population level. Therefore, in recent generations,
differences in reproductive success are almost entirely a matter of differences
in fertility – the more babies that are born, the greater the reproductive
success.

On top of this, since the middle 1960s the fertility among
European populations has gone below replacement levels (modern replacement
fertility is just above two children per woman – above two to account for
premature mortality) – so the age-corrected population of Europeans has been
declining for several decades. (This decline in numbers was temporarily masked
by an increase in life expectancy – leading to an ‘ageing population’ with a
median average age of Europeans being typically around the mid-forties and
climbing).

Sub-fertility especially applies to intelligent women; for
example, in recent decades more than a third of women college graduates have
zero children – and most college graduates are women. The most intelligent and
most highly-educated women have extremely few children on average – in Lewis
Terman’s follow-up studies of highly intelligent Californians from the early
twentieth century, the most intelligent women had only approximately half a
child per woman: only about a quarter of the replacement rate.[88]

The extension of years of formal education and training into
the middle and late twenties, resulting in greater and greater delays in
initiating families (the average age of a woman having her first child in Britain is now about 30); combined with increased
involvement of women in the workforce (a trend that has been strongly
encouraged both by radical feminism and by capitalism), seems to have had a
particularly lethal effect on reproduction of intelligent women.

This change to extreme sub-fertility among the most
intelligent seems to be due to several specific factors working together. One
is surely secularism and the decline of religion, which is most evident among
the most intelligent.[89]
Even under modern conditions, traditional patriarchal religions often have
above replacement fertility[90] –
sometimes very high rates of fertility – so religion
can be an antidote to subfertility, but it is one which that is seldom used
by the most intelligent.

Also important is the rise of contraception, the easy
availability of multiple methods of contraception, and its social acceptability
– in a context where contraception is more efficiently used by the more
intelligent, who would be less impulsive anyway. The legalization and mass
usage of abortion is a factor in enabling the decline of birth rates into
sub-fertility, although probably not a factor in differential fertility by
intelligence.

There are other more general factors, such as a more stable
environment – meaning there is no need to have lots of children, so large
families will tend to accidental, and underpinned by impulsiveness and thus low
intelligence. These adverse trends were probably compounded by a dysgenic
accumulation of deleterious mutations caused by the relaxation of mutation
filtering from natural selection, mostly caused by the sharp decline in child
mortality rates.

In sum, there seems little doubt that the pattern of
differential reproduction in relation to intelligence must have had an effect
on reducing average intelligence.

Measuring the decline of intelligence

It is one thing knowing that in
principle intelligence must be declining; but the problem is that IQ testing is
not suitable for measuring long term trends. An IQ questionnaire is a relative
measure: it puts people into rank order by their test results – but it does not
give an objective measure of intelligence levels.

In other words, IQ testing is like running races and placing
people into first, second, third positions etc., but never using a stopwatch.
This makes it impossible to know, over the decades, whether people are running
faster, slower or staying the same. What is needed is some kind of objective
measure of intelligence: a stopwatch.

This limitation in IQ testing led to the idea by one of this
book’s authors (Bruce G. Charlton) of measuring long term trends in
intelligence using exactly a stopwatch measure: in other words studying the
historical changes in the simple reaction time (sRT) measurement; because
reaction times have been measured since the late 1800s, and provide an
objective correlate of general intelligence.

Simple reaction times (sRT) typically involve something like
pressing a button as rapidly as possible in response to a light coming-on, and
measuring the time taken – this procedure usually takes some small fraction of
a second: i.e. some few hundreds of milliseconds. Such reaction times are well
known to be correlated with ‘g’ (general intelligence). While the correlation
with intelligence is not large, sRTs have the great advantage of being
objective and quantitative physiological measures – they are more like
measuring height or blood pressure than getting people to do an IQ test (which
is essentially a form of exam).

Working with Charlton, Michael Woodley discovered an
already-published survey of historical reaction time data that demonstrated a
striking slowing of sRTs from the time of Francis Galton in the late nineteenth
century until the late 20th century. This data carried the strong
implication that there had been a rapid and substantial decline in intelligence
over the past hundred-plus years – and opened-up a new field of research which
Woodley has been actively pursuing ever since.

This initial finding, which Charlton published on his blog,
has since been improved, replicated and confirmed by Woodley and his colleagues[91]
who have deployed other convergent methods for indirectly measuring long term
intelligence changes.[92]
Using reaction time data, the decline in genotypic IQ is of-the-order of 1.5 IQ
points per decade – that is about 15 points, or one standard deviation, in a
century; and probably more, over the past two hundred years. [93]
To put this in perspective, 15 points would be approximately the difference in
average IQ between a low level security guard (85) and a police constable
(100), or between a high school science teacher (115) and a biology professor
at an elite university (130).

In other words, in terms of intelligence, the average
Englishman from about 1880-1900 would be in roughly the top 15 per cent of the
population in 2000 – and the difference would be even larger if we extrapolated
back further towards about 1800 when the Industrial Revolution began to
initiate massive demographic changes in the British population (although this
was a time before reaction time measures existed).

These numbers are not intended to be precise – indeed real
precision (in the sense of exact accuracy in averages and measures of scatter
around averages) is not available in IQ studies for many reasons to do with the
difficulties of truly random and sufficiently large population sampling, lack
of a full range of unbiased and objective data; and the fact the IQ points are
not on a ‘ratio scale’ but are derived from putting a population sample into
rank order on the basis of (usually) one-off testing.

However, the take-home message is that there has been a
large and important decline in the average intelligence of Western populations
over the past century and more. In every day terms; the academics of the year
2000 were the school teachers of 1900, the school teachers of the year 2000 would
have been the factory workers (the average people) of 1900, the office workers
and policemen of 2000 were the farm labourers of 1900, while the low level
security guards and shop assistants of 2000 were probably in the workhouse, on
the streets or dead in 1900.

The substantial long-term unemployed or unemployable,
chronically sick or physically/ psychologically disabled, dependent
‘underclass’ of 2000, simply didn’t exist in 1900. And even this estimate is ignoring
the expansion of education since 1900, which expanded the middle class
occupations and would, in itself, reduce the average intelligence of academics
and teachers in 2000 compared to 1900.

But what about the Flynn effect?

Objective measures show that
intelligence has declined rapidly and substantially over the past century or
two; but it is also true that the so-called ‘Flynn Effect’ has been evident.

This name refers to the fact that IQ raw scores (i.e. the
results on IQ tests, the proportion of correct answers) have been rising
throughout the 20th century in Western countries.[94]
So, performance in IQ tests has been increasing at the same time as real,
underlying general intelligence has been decreasing.

This can happen because IQ score is a relative, not an
absolute, measure of intelligence – and because it is essentially the result of
a timed examination involving answering questions. There are likely to be many
reasons for increasing IQ scores, indeed any reason for increased exam scores
might be contributory – for example improved health, cultural change,
educational expansion, socialization of testing procedures, test question and
format familiarity, teaching of test strategies, increased use of multiple
choice formats (where guessing is encouraged), probably also increased levels
of cheating – all may contribute variously to IQ test scores rising even as
intelligence declined.

But even the Flynn effect has now plateaued or gone into
reverse in a number of countries,[95] and
the rise in scores have been shown to be occurring most on the least g-loaded
parts of the tests.[96] So,
general intelligence has been declining substantially and rapidly even though IQ test scores used to be
increasing.

Furthermore, it seems likely that while underlying intelligence
was much higher in the past, the measurable intellectual performance – for
example in examinations, intelligence tests, and in real life situations – of
most people was severely damaged by lack of education, harsh physical
conditions such as cold and damp, starvation, disease, exhaustion and endemic
severe infectious disease, pain and disabilities and so on. Such factors would
be expected substantially to reduce (or abolish) many aspects of intellectual
performance in difficult tasks by (for example) impairing concentration and
motivation.

Imagine doing an IQ test, an examination, or attempting any
challenging intellectual activity such as reading a difficult book or
performing calculations; while suffering with a fever or chronic pain or gnawed
by hunger: imagine suffering fevers, pain, or hunger continuously for most of
your life… but this was the normal situation for most of the population in
earlier times. No matter what their underlying level of intelligence might be,
their performance was significantly impaired for much of the time.

High-IQ genes versus low-IQ genes

At a genetic level, intelligence may
in principle reduce because of a reduction in high intelligence genes in a
population and/or as an accumulation of intelligence-damaging mutations in the
population.

Differential fertility would lead to a decline in
intelligence by a reduction in the proportion of high IQ genes in the
population. This happens from a combination of the relatively less intelligent
people having on average the most children, and the most intelligent people
having very low fertility. Since the most intelligent people are sub-fertile,
with less than two offspring per woman, the genes which have made them the most
intelligent will decline in each generation – first declining as a proportion
of the gene pool, and then declining in absolute prevalence.

For instance, when there is a woman with ultra-high
intelligence who has zero children (which is the most usual outcome among
ultra-intelligent women), then whatever it was about her genes which made her
so intelligent is eliminated from the gene pool: this is the loss of ‘high-IQ
genes’.[97]

But our suggestion of mutation accumulation is that there is
an additional mechanism of an accumulation of what could be termed ‘low-IQ
genes’. To be clear: these are not genes coding for low intelligence – rather
they are damaged genes which pathologically reduce intelligence. So, as well as
there being a decline in intelligence from the reduced proportion of ‘high-IQ’
genes, there is also an increase in the proportion of ‘low IQ genes’ in the
population.

High IQ genes have (presumably) been selected for in the
past because they increased intelligence, and thereby (under ancestral – especially
Medieval – conditions) increased reproductive success.

But low IQ genes are not, in general, a product of natural
selection: rather they are spontaneously occurring deleterious mutations, which
happen with every generation due to any cause of genetic damage (e.g.
electromagnetic radiation, chemical damage), or errors in replication.

These mutations will, if not eliminated, accumulate
generation upon generation. Therefore when they have accumulated, the low-IQ
genes were not ‘selected for’; rather it was a matter of lack of selection, relaxation of natural selection. ‘Low IQ gene’
therefore usually means something like a genetic mutation that – in potentially
a wide range of ways, by impairing almost any aspect of brain structure,
organization or functioning – actively damages brain processing speed and
efficiency, hence reducing general intelligence.

In technical terms, the selection mechanism for eliminating
these spontaneously accumulating low IQ genes is mutation-selection balance.
The idea is that mutations spontaneously occur and need selectively to be
eliminated. In other words, by some means, those organisms which have damaging
mutations must (on average) fail to reproduce – must indeed be prevented from reproducing – so they
will not hand-on the mutations to the next generation, and contaminate the gene
pool with mutations.

Conversely, only a small proportion of the population – i.e.
those with good genes – are allowed (by the selective environment) to
reproduce; and typically this minority will provide nearly all of the next
generation.

Since there are new mutations each generation, as well as
the possibility of some inherited from parents, the process needs to be perfect
over the long term, otherwise the accumulation of damaging mutations will
eventually prevent reproduction and damage survival to cause extinction. The
term for such extinction is mutational
meltdown – and this has been observed to occur in some lower organisms,
especially when mutations are accumulating and the population is reducing. This
probably happens in some inbred captive populations such as in zoos, as well as
in modern human society.

The term mutation-selection balance refers to the fact that
the occurrence of mutations must be balanced by the elimination of mutations:
natural selection (including sexual selection – mate choice) must be powerful
enough to sieve-out all the deleterious mutations. If natural selection is not
strong enough to do this, then mutations will accumulate, brain function will
be damaged, and intelligence will decline.

Each spontaneous mutation has about a fifty-fifty chance of
damaging brain function, because the brain depends on a very high proportion of
genes to develop normally and make its structural components, its proteins,
enzymes, hormones, neurotransmitters and so on. Thus the brain is a large ‘mutational
target’ (as Geoffrey Miller has termed it) – and will usually show up, in a
quantitative fashion, the amount of mutational damage a person has. In other
words, high intelligence requires ‘Good Genes’ – where good genes means a
genome low in mutations; conversely a high mutational load will cause low
intelligence.

Before the Industrial Revolution, individuals with a higher
mutational load, which means a higher load of low-IQ genes (and therefore lower
intelligence) had lower-than-average reproductive success due to very high
(indeed, probably near total) childhood mortality rates. But since the child
mortality rates fell from more than half to about one per cent in most of
Europe, almost all babies that are born have survived to adulthood, and most of
them have reproduced. Therefore, we must assume that there have by now been
several generations – in England at least eight generations – of mutation
accumulation. And we must also assume that this has had a significant effect in
reducing intelligence.

This produces what is truly a ‘dysgenic’ effect on
intelligence, since it is not evolved, not adaptive, not a new ability – but
instead a lowering of intelligence due to a pathological process; a destruction
of adaptive human intelligence caused by an accumulation of damage.

And although intelligence decline is a sensitive measure of
mutation accumulation – it is not the only consequence. Many other human
adaptations would be destroyed by mutation accumulation – including evolved
human personality types. As well as pulling down human intelligence; mutation
accumulation would be expected to destroy the Endogenous personality, to impair
human creativity – and would be a further nail in the coffin of genius.

Decline of intelligence due to mutation accumulation

So, the decline of intelligence that
has now been measured using reaction times and confirmed with other methods,
has been too fast, and gone too far, fully to be accounted for by the mechanism
of differences in fertility between most and least intelligent.

To re-emphasize; we have no doubt that this mechanism of
differential fertility has had an effect in reducing intelligence over the past
two hundred years, but there must be other additional explanations for so great
and rapid a decline in intelligence – a decline (we argue) that has been
sufficient to all-but eliminate world class geniuses from the European
population, and hence the world.

We therefore suggest that the main additional mechanism to
reduce intelligence may plausibly be the generation-by-generation accumulation
of deleterious genetic mutations; as a result of the near-elimination of
historically high child mortality rates which used-to clear mutations from the
gene pool with each generation.[98]

But after the Industrial Revolution got going, mortality
rates declined for the least intelligent along with everyone else; so that even
the poorest families usually raised several-to-many children, then there was a double-whammy dysgenic effect: a reduced
proportion of high IQ genes with each generation (due to progressively lowering
fertility among the higher IQ) and also an increasing accumulation of low IQ
genes (intelligence-damaging deleterious mutations) with each generation.

In sum, since the Industrial Revolution, individuals with
the greatest mutational load (IQ-harmful genes) have been initially been
above-replacement fertile (having on average more than 2 surviving children per
woman, for the first time in history perhaps), and also differentially more
fertile than those with the least mutational load. And compared with 150-200
years ago, there is now a lower proportion (and a lowering absolute amount) of
IQ-enhancing genes in the gene pool of England, plus a higher proportion and
accumulation of deleterious IQ-damaging mutations. And this double-whammy
effect is, we think, why average general intelligence has declined so rapidly
and so much in England over the past couple of centuries.

Historical trends in the prevalence of genius

So, the first effect of the ‘perfect
storm’ of English geniuses (also probably seen, although not yet documented, in
several other European nations such as France and Germany) was to expand the
population and thereby increase the number of English geniuses; but as the
generations went by, the adverse selection factors and mutation accumulation
would have ‘sabotaged’ the expansion of geniuses by reducing the average
intelligence in the population – firstly the proportion, and then the actual
number, of people of very high intelligence, so that the number of new geniuses
occurring dwindled into again being extremely rare and ‘one off’.

As a consequence, it has been documented by Woodley and
others that the number of ‘breakthrough’ macro-inventions – major inventions
that really alter how we live – has decreased markedly since the Victorian Era,
though there are still many micro-inventions, which are merely tinkering with
macro-inventions.[99]

For example, a macro-innovation like the computer was
invented by geniuses (such as Babbage, Turing and von Neumann) up to the middle
twentieth century; and the multiple improvements in miniaturization, processing
speed and memory etc. – which have made the computer so widely useful – are
classified as micro-innovations, and were made by a multitude of people and
organizations, often employing ‘trial and error’ type methods.

So, micro-innovations are extremely important, and make a
big difference, and take some decades to emerge –the fact is that micro-innovations
are not so difficult as macro-innovations. In particular micro-innovations do
not require such exceptionally creative people as macro-innovations – but
instead can emerge from knowledge accumulation, high-normal levels of
cleverness, communication, and routine ‘research and development’.

The importance of genius in human history – and specifically
in modern society – is that we argue that it was the uniquely high number and
concentration of geniuses in the European population that triggered and
sustained the Industrial Revolution. Genius-generated macro-innovations
provided the foundation for amplification by numerous micro-innovations; and
the combination supported an expansion in world population from about one to
seven billion, and still growing.

As intelligence declines, the foundations for this
socio-economic system will be removed. The breakthrough-upon-breakthrough
needed to provide and sustain growth will presumably be the first to dry up.
Then there will be a period of plateau when people can continue to exploit and
marginally-improve upon the successes of the past – some decades as
micro-innovations are developed. (These stages are probably already behind us.)

But as intelligence continues to decline, then growth in
productivity will reverse into decline and inefficiency, as the ability of
people to sustain, repair, even to maintain, the highly technical, specialized
and coordinated world civilization will be lost, just as occurred with the fall
of Western Roman civilization; when agricultural and industrial production and
trade all collapsed, the standard of living and population plummeted, and
general technical and organizational levels took more than a millennium to
recover.

When the supply of major geniuses becomes inadequate, or
dries-up altogether, then the past two to three centuries of world productivity
growth – which depended on a continual stream of major discoveries – one
innovation making possible another, one repairing the problems generated by
another, and all of them interacting to enable further innovation… all this
will come to an end. And since modernity (the socio-economic system since the Industrial
Revolution) depends on growth – specifically growth in capability and
efficiency/ productivity – then modernity will first halt, then reverse.

Arguably this reversal has already happened in The West, and
we are now living off capital – well embarked on a downslope of reduced
societal efficiency which affects all nations (because the innovations and
breakthroughs created by geniuses of European origin have usually spread to the
rest of the world).

So, we believe that the end of the ‘age of genius’ entails
the end of modernity – the end of the type of society that has dominated and
spread across the world since the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions;
whether the cause is that we have run out of geniuses, or because (as some
people argue) we have merely run out of major things for geniuses to discover.
Either way, the consequences are the same: the collapse of modernity, which
absolutely depends on a steady supply of geniuses and breakthroughs – and
reversion to pre-Industrial Revolution conditions, of one sort or another.

Chapter Thirteen

The neglect
and suppression of genius

Genius and the educational system

The Genius Triad is intelligence, intuitive
creativity and long-term self-motivation – all focused on the same domain.
Psychologically the triad could be termed Questing Creative Intelligence; and
QCI will be found not only among potential geniuses of the major type, but also
with lower strength among small-scale geniuses, more local or partial geniuses;
who, although capable of far less than the likes of Rutherford, George
Stephenson or Alan Turing; nonetheless will work for, and tend to make,
original breakthroughs. It is up to other people whether these breakthroughs
are noticed, understood and used; or (as so often happens at present) ignored,
vilified and suppressed.

With the decline in average intelligence, and the resulting
decline of genius, society becomes ever more short-term oriented and
politically less stable as these factors have been shown to be underpinned by
national intelligence. Richard Lynn and Finnish political scientist Tatu
Vanhanen (1929-2015), for example, have shown that numerous measures of
civilization – education level, sanitation, democracy (and so smooth transfers
of power), political stability, and lack of crime and corruption – are all
moderately to strongly predicted by national IQ.[100]
And they have shown that these national IQs are highly reliable as they
strongly correlate with national measures of proxies for IQ, such as
international student assessments.

In a society of declining intelligence, we would expect:
rising crime and corruption; decreasing civic participation and lower voter
turn-out; higher rates of illegitimacy; poorer health and greater obesity, an
increased interest in the instinctive, especially sex; greater political
instability and decline in democracy; higher levels of social conflict; higher
levels of selfishness and so a decline in any welfare state; a growing
unemployable underclass; falling educational standards; and a lack of
intellectualism and thus decreasing interest in education as a good in itself.
We would also expect more and more little things to go wrong that we didn’t
used to notice: buses running out of petrol, trains delayed, aeroplanes landing
badly, roads not being repaired, people arriving late and thinking it’s
perfectly okay; several large and lots of little lies . . .

In addition, the broader modern system – especially of extended
formal education (stretching ever further into adult life), exam results and
continuous assessments, required subjects and courses; the supposed ‘meritocracy’
– suppresses the influence of genius, since the Endogenous personality is
seeking, ever more strongly with age, to follow his inner drives, his Destiny,
and all the paraphernalia of normal, standard requirements stands in his path.
While others need sticks and carrots, and are grateful for encouragement,
discipline and direction; the Endogenous personality is driven from within and
(beyond a basic minimum) he neither needs nor appreciates these things – at
best they slow him down, at worst they thwart and exclude him. The Endogenous
personality requires mainly to be allowed
to do what he intrinsically and spontaneously wants to do – but in modern
society he is more likely to be prevented.

Creative people always have difficult personalities; and
conversely nice people with conscientious, obedient reliable personalities are
not creative. This means that institutions, employers and patrons must tolerate the difficulties of
Endogenous personalities, if they want those things done that only geniuses can
do. Most of the time, potential geniuses are a nuisance – but there are times
when such people are essential.

However, in order to do these things geniuses, have to find
themselves a job or a university place or a patron. In a less meritocratic
society, this might be via family
connections or informally demonstrating one’s genius. In other words, the
difficult short term decision to appoint, tolerate, perhaps even reward an
asocial Endogenous personality instead of a conscientious and popular Head Girl
type might be made by an individual who knew the nature and potential of the
Endogenous personality (perhaps because he was himself an Endogenous
personality).

But, nowadays, such decisions are usually made by committee
vote, by officials and bureaucrats who are themselves usually the opposite of
geniuses; and done according to guidelines and protocols – ‘standard procedures’
and an attitude of risk-minimization will almost invariably tend to exclude
geniuses, who are nearly always lop-sided with weaknesses as well as strengths,
and each a one-off in terms of aptitude.

The Endogenous personality combines high intelligence with
the ‘inner’ personality; and it used to be fairly normal for Endogenous
personalities to gain admittance to the most elite institutions. However,
nowadays, it is clear that college admission criteria are much less likely to
select for intelligence than in the past. In other words, attendance at the
most selective institutions is no longer a matter of being of the highest
intelligence. Partly this is because of the changing nature of educational
evaluations – the best reports and grades at school or top performance in exams
are no longer so ‘g-loaded’ that is, they are less correlated with general
intelligence than they used to be (some of this may be due to the IQ test score
inflation which is termed ‘the Flynn Effect’).

But it seems certain that ‘elite’ modern institutions are
not evaluating and selecting primarily on the basis of intelligence – since
they do not use intelligence tests, high intelligence is only selected-for
insofar as it correlates with the educational, personal and other assessments
which are used for selection – and the correlation between these and
intelligence is not close (around 0.5 for high school achievement), and much
less close than it used to be.

Nor are the elite modern institutions selecting for
personality qualities of independent and inner motivations and evaluations that
are an intrinsic part of the Endogenous personality – quite the opposite, in
fact; since there are multiple preferences and quotas in place which net
exclude European-descended men (that group with by far the highest proportion of Endogenous personalities – i.e.
having the ultra-high intelligence and creative personality type). This can be
seen in explicit group preference policies and campaigns enforced by government
(and the mass media), and informal (covert) preferences – leading to ratios and
compositions at elite institution (especially obvious in STEM subjects: i.e. Science,
Technology, Engineering, Medicine) that demonstrate grossly lower proportions
of European-descended men than would result from selecting for the Endogenous
personality type.

Indeed modern institutions are not even trying to select
primarily by intelligence – the reality of which they often deny; but instead
are implicitly – by the nature of their evaluations – and also by
explicitly-stated policies – selecting on other grounds, especially for the ‘Head
Girl’ personality – the conscientious, empathic, socially integrated
all-rounders. Modern society is, of course, run by Head Girls, of both sexes
(plus a smattering of charming or charismatic psychopaths), hence there is no
assigned place for the creative genius. Modern colleges aim at recruiting Head
Girls, so do universities, so does science, so do the arts, so does the mass
media, so does the legal profession, so does medicine, so does the military.
And in doing so, except insofar as they make errors; they filter-out and
exclude even the possibility of creative
genius.[101]

If a creative genius does somehow happen to get-through, by
error or accident – that is, someone who can recognize the Endogenous
personality and may be expected to favour it – then he will not in practice be
allowed to select more of his type; because of the way that all significant
decisions are taken by committees (dominated by Head Girl types) and controlled
by checklists, guidelines and protocols. These will have been designed, and are
enforced, by Head Girl types with the aim of excluding those who do not conform
to what is ‘normally’ required (thereby excluding those who are better than
normal, along with those who are worse than normal).

As a result of the above trends, the most intelligent and
the most creative people are nowadays dispersed among variously ranked
institutions (and no-institutions-at-all); and typically have sub-optimal – sometimes
frankly bad – academic and employment records. The Endogenous personalities are
very seldom to be found in the most prestigious, best-funded, or fashionable
subjects (unless they were the original founders of the field, or perhaps at a
low level or in a marginal capacity) – since a genius is stubbornly self-motivated,
and will work only where his destiny leads him (and he may refuse or neglect
work that interferes with his destiny). The fields in which genius is questing
are as various as the people with genius; and will often strike other people as
futile or absurd; nonetheless, ‘eccentricity’ is intrinsic to the necessary
autonomy of genius.

Genius and societal self-interest

The reason for society to tolerate
and sustain geniuses is not that geniuses deserve more concern than other kinds
of people – the bottom-line reason is societal self-interest.

Geniuses are ‘for’ the good of the human group; they are
people with a special gift for solving specially-difficult problems; and all
human societies are confronted – sooner or later and usually sooner – by the
kinds of problems that can only be solved by geniuses; lacking-which, the
problems are simply not solved. British mathematician Alan Turing’s (1912-1954)
cracking of the Enigma code – portrayed in the 2014 film The Imitation Game is a case in point. This intensely difficult man
had to struggle against Head Girl types to get a job for the government and
then to build his code-cracking machine. But if there had been no Turing, the
War would have lasted significantly longer, with terrible consequences.[102]

To reiterate, geniuses are people who combine an especially
high intellectual ability with a spontaneous tendency to focus on some abstract
(by ‘abstract’ we mean ‘not-social’) problem, and the inner motivation to
maintain this focus, to quest for an answer, for relatively long periods of
time. However, there are only two ways that they can realistically find the
space to pursue their genius: a patron or, in some cases, a well-funded
university.

Indeed, if the genius can become an academic he is
confronted with further problems. Once upon a time, he could do occasional
teaching and then devote himself to his research, publishing if he discovered
anything. Now, there is constant pressure to publish, publish in certain
journals, attend conferences (Hellish social events for geniuses), and obtain
research grants. This would drive many geniuses out of academia, leaving it
dominated by the Head Girls.

To read of such difficult, annoying, disruptive geniuses as
mathematical physicist Paul Dirac (1902-1984; who almost never spoke)[103]
or the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951; who refused to socialize or
even eat with colleagues, or do administration; and taught only the people he
wanted to teach and in exactly the way he wanted to teach them),[104]
and then to realize that these were Professors at the world-leading University
of Cambridge – is to recognize that such characters would nowadays get nowhere
near a Cambridge chair or any other chair (not least because actual ability to
perform at a really high level in one’s subject or function, is no longer
regarded as of primary importance in modern British universities, or indeed anywhere
else in Britain).

Where instead do such men find themselves? The answer is not
known for sure – but anecdotal information and our personal knowledge suggests
that they are scattered in multiple and various marginal and low status
circumstances, where their potentially vital work is assiduously ignored,
mocked or attacked – and this endemic and chronic hostility sooner-or-later tends
to have a knock-on, deleterious, distorting effect on their attitudes and
output; inducing a bitterness, pride, aggressive irritability, a siege
mentality, despair and inertia – or some other wholly-understandable but
profoundly unhelpful and achievement-destructive frame of mind.

Meanwhile, compliant, careerist, sociable mediocrity is
zealously enforced by the ruling Head Girl types; whose primary, often sole,
concern is their own social micro-environment. And as average intelligence has
declined, two things have happened that have had a major impact on the
university.

Firstly, the ideal of the pursuit of truth has been replaced
by the pursuit of an ideology. And secondly, the idea that education is a good
in itself – an intellectual idea, requiring honesty, personal dedication, and
long term thinking in terms of the future and nature of society – has disappeared;
to be replaced by the view that it is a means to an end, a way of getting a
certificate, making money, having a ‘party’ lifestyle – things in which the
potential genius is not really interested (and should not become interested).

So colleges and universities – which used to be a haven for
geniuses – have instead become a mixture of ideological churches; holiday camps;
schools of dissipation and irresponsibility; ‘learning shops’ run by managers,
accountants and public relations professionals; and research factories
generating ‘evidence’ as required by whomsoever has money enough to fund them.

Thus in Britain, and in all the other European and European
diaspora nations (the USA, Canada, Australia etc.); we see the same picture of
a society with a high concentration of effective geniuses that flipped, quite
suddenly – and in the space of a generation or two – into a society which is in
practice, and almost universally, actively anti-genius: a society selecting
against genius, excluding of genius, persecuting of genius.

Fake creativity

Although the picture is one of an
extraordinarily rapid decline in the prevalence of geniuses, the trend has been
confused and clouded by the simple expedient of re-labelling and denial.

By re-labelling, some non-creative nonentity (maybe someone
of high career status, maybe of high but un-creative ability, maybe a charming
character, maybe just a novelty-merchant) is simply stated to be a genius, repeatedly talked about as a genius – probably
given awards and medals for being a genius – and the concept of genius is
thereby blurred, relativized and even further discredited.

By denial we mean the common notion among sophisticated
modern people that ‘geniuses’ are no different from anyone else – the denial
that there is indeed such a thing as a genius – that the whole thing is a
matter of luck or labelling, or a cult of personality, or romanticism – or part
of an hierarchical (and probably patriarchal) conspiracy. By the end of this
deconstruction and subversion, the disappearance of genius has been disguised
by denying that there ever was genius, and the whole thing relativized into a
matter of professional eminence, or even just fame or notoriety – so the latest
‘shocking’ novelist is actually, basically, the same as Shakespeare; the latest
art gallery ‘installation’ doing the same thing as a Rembrandt portrait or a
Rodin sculpture.

This can be seen most obviously in fields where, by the
evaluative standards of a century ago, there are no living geniuses at all. For
example classical music, fine art, and poetry (in English).

Worse still, ‘originality’ – rather than consequence – has
become the test of genius. The fact that something is ‘original’ – meaning novel, makes it praise-worthy. In fact,
originality has now become indistinguishable from mere changes of fashion.

In previous eras, there was not a special status given to
novelty as an aspect of high quality work – but since about 1800 in the West
there has been: greatness is supposedly mostly a matter of being innovative. Yet
while great geniuses may innovate this is not the rule, for instance Gluck and
J.C. Bach were greater innovators, but much lesser composers than, J.S. Bach
and Mozart; Constable and Gainsborough were less original, but higher quality,
painters than Francis Bacon or Lucien Freud.

Therefore we currently have an incentive system in place to
generate fake creativity: an
incentive system in which there are un-creative people who dishonestly strive
to be regarded as original because they want to appropriate the label of
creative and usurp the title of ‘genius’. In sum, under modernity creativity
has been reduced to novelty – and novelty can be simulated.

It is trivially easy for clever and well-trained people to
generate mere novelty, so there is an excess of it (we call it ‘fashion’). Therefore
the discriminative test applied to novelties is whether they are approved by
the social systems that allocate high status. When novelty is socially approved,
then the person who generated it gets to be called creative – maybe even a
creative genius.

Thus: Novelty of outcome + Social Approval of that outcome =
Fake creativity

And fake creativity is an attribute bestowed upon an outcome or person; bestowed by the social systems
for generating status – in other words the mass media (primarily), politics,
civil administration, the legal system, education... in a nutshell the Leftist Establishment.

We regard it as quite obvious and undeniable that the
Establishment is now ‘Leftist’ as evidenced by dominance of those with this
perspective in academia, among senior churchmen, in the media, and in all
mainstream political parties – all of which promote some degree of Political
Correctness. The radicals of the 1960s, and their followers, are the
honour-loaded Establishment of today. The British philosopher Sean Gabb has
documented how, since the 1960s, the Left has displaced the traditional
‘conservative’ Establishment, taking over almost all of organs on the British
State, including the police and legal system.[105]
The dominance of Leftism in academia has been documented in numerous studies.[106]

So, as would be expected, political correctness has captured
creativity – and replaced real creativity with a fake creativity which is
controlled by the arbiters of modernity: that is, mostly the mass media. So
modern ‘creatives’ are celebrated for their subversion of (or exposure of the
supposed hypocrisy of) traditional, bourgeois and religious values; and
rewarded for their celebrations of equality, pacifism, rebellion, feminism,
sexual experimentation, antiracism, multiculturalism, and the rest of it...

This matter of being able to define/ bestow the accolade of
creativity is of extreme importance to the modern intellectual establishment – indeed,
fake creativity stands close to the heart of the ideological project of the
modern (Leftist) elite – because the Left works mainly via manipulations of
esteem, including self-esteem. Its enemies are portrayed as immoral (especially
‘selfish,’ judgemental or ‘racist’ and thus associated with the Nazis and their
horrors) and of low intelligence, knuckle-dragging crudity, retardation and/ or
lunacy.

Thus to claim to be a ‘creative’ person has been changed
from being the mere observation of a psychological fact; to an arrogant claim
of deserving high social status for having achieved something which is approved
by social arbiters.

Chapter Sixteen

The War on
Genius

When we observe past societies, and
how they were able to sustain geniuses and make us aware of the work of
geniuses; the question arises: How was it that such simple and unselfconscious
societies could spontaneously recognize and respond to something as complex and
unpredictable and unique as a genius – when our much more prosperous and complex
society cannot?

The reason is just that most human societies of the past,
and certainly those societies where genius most thrived, were serious; they recognized that life is a
serious business, that there is a reason for it all, a purpose to it all, and
(in those societies where genius was most prevalent) that each person had a
part to play – by contrast, at least in mainstream public discourse, modern
Western society does not acknowledge any of this.

Charles Murray, in Human
Accomplishment, suggested what we believe to be one correct answer: that
for people in the past, the human condition was (in one way or another)
eternally significant. Not only that, but life was perceived to be fragile,
existential threats such as conquest or collapse were close at hand; and the
people responsible for rulership knew a certain ‘type’ of personality had been
able to solve major and unprecedented problems in the past.

But modern society has all-but lost this sense of the
seriousness of life. We agree with Murray that this is substantially a consequence
of the process of secularization, a matter of the loss of religion – since the
most genius-conducive religions create a perspective extending beyond our
mortal life and immediate sensory and emotional experiences. In public
discourse, religion has been replaced by various secular, this-worldly
socio-political ideologies. But all modern Western countries now share a
triumphant, generically-Leftist ideology (extremely
Leftist by world historical standards) that embraces all mainstream politics,
administration, mass media and leadership. This underpins all the powerful political parties including those which are self-identified as Conservative,
Republican, Nationalist, Libertarian and religious; and including leadership of
all large organizations, institutions, and corporations – whatever their titles
or self-definitions.

The modern ideology is compounded of human rights, equality,
individuality, minimization of suffering and maximization of self-respect,
diversity, inclusion and a strong emphasis on non-traditional sexual
self-expression and identity. But the point is not so much these positive
doctrines as the negative ones: this-life is all there is, and there is no
meaning to life beyond the happiness or misery experienced; there is no
objectivity to morality, humans are existentially alone and communication is
uncertain and mostly a matter of self-deception. In sum, the modern ideology is
secular and nihilistic, and modern people are short-termist,
pleasure-orientated, and alienated.

One reason for the decline of religion is ‘luxury’ – that is
the high levels of comfort and convenience in modern life, and the detachment
from the natural world and immediate threats to survival. With the Industrial
Revolution, the reduction of child and young adult mortality, the de facto elimination of starvation and
mass lethal epidemics, the provision of near universal shelter and warmth etc.;
plus actual and the expectation of continually-rising standards of living and
ever-more-abundant provision of pleasures and entertainments – from all these
factors and others the causes of our acute sufferings and fears have very much
been taken away and, on a daily basis, we are so insulated that there seems to be no pressing need to believe that
life has eternal significance.

Religiousness seems to be motivated and enforced by direct
environmental stress. For instance, it reduces stress at the prospect of
mortality by making us believe that our life is eternally significant. This is
why perceived religious experiences tend to occur at times of danger or to
people prone to stress.[107] Elimination
of directly acting stresses tends to weaken or altogether abolish religion. In
contrast, the abstract, free-floating, impossible-to-locate ‘angst’ of modern
life clearly does not lead to religiousness; but rather to despair.

It seems paradoxical to moderns (who usually believe, or at
least assert, that the existence of suffering refutes the reality of God); but
the harder life is the more strongly religious people tend to be (for instance,
the most recent significant Christian revival in Britain occurred during the Second
World War); and the more comfortable and convenient life becomes, the less
people seem to need religion, or to get immediate personal satisfaction from
church membership and participation.

Of course people still feel gnawing anxiety, depression and
despair. But these do not trigger religiousness, being increasingly dealt with by
24/7 distraction provided by the mass media, interpersonal communication and
quick transportation; any dysphoria (mild depression or otherwise unpleasant
feelings) is dealt with by mass medication with tranquillizers and
emotion-numbing ‘antidepressants’, ‘antipsychotics’ or ‘mood stabilizers’
(these words are placed in ‘scare quotes’ because they are all marketing terms
with negligible scientific or clinical rationale).

Modern Man can, if he wishes, ignore his mortality, not
think about it – so distant is it from everyday life; so many and so thick are
the insulating layers between himself and the real environment of food,
clothing, shelter and warmth; invaders, predators and parasites. He can live
absorbed in a world of drugged distraction. And this is, pretty much, the
totality of the modern vision of life.

As such, the Endogenous personality, or potential genius, is
perceived as a problem for modernity because the genius is only appreciated, only
makes people happy, when there is an acknowledged crisis. And when there is no
obvious crisis or, if there is, it is so far in the future that most of us lack
the future-orientation (in other words, the intelligence) to worry about it or
even believe in it; or when we can simply be persuaded (by the mass media) to
deny or ignore the crisis, or re-label crisis as progress . . . then the genius
becomes just an annoying and apparently unproductive person: a social irritant
rather than a potential societal saviour.

So, modern society is in practice indifferent or hostile to
genius and the products of genius; since we are complacent, trivial and
evasive. For us, problems are merely part of the world of sensation and
entertainment – continually defined then re-defined; and genius is just one of
many millions of things to be taken-up, contemplated briefly, then impatiently
set aside in the unending quest for novel stimulations.

Also, modern institutions are almost always controlled by managers;
and managers do not participate directly with the primary function of
organizations (e.g. managers of research do not do research, managers of
hospitals do not provide health care, managers of widget factories do not carve
the widgets) – therefore for the manager (qua
manager) ‘the bottom line’, the effective ‘reality’ is ultimately the
perception of others. This is why, as management takeover has become more
complete in The West; management of perceptions, impressions, opinions etc. has
come to dominate organizations. For management, ‘truth’ is what people
currently think is true, and if what-people-think can be shaped to suit
expediency– then so can ‘truth’.

Therefore, it seems that modern society is indifferent/
hostile to genius for the simple reason that as – a human group – we perceive no real and urgent sense of
group self-interest. We cannot really believe in real-problems and the real-need
for real-solutions – we deny that there is a price to pay for survival, and
that genius is one of these prices.

And insofar as modern society is aware of geniuses having
provided solutions to real and vital societal problems, these answers are typically
vehemently rejected. We don’t acknowledge tough problems demanding tough
solutions – we instead demand easy answers. Indeed, we really don’t want
answers – because we pretend things are already solved, or that solutions just
happen, naturally, as part of the nature of things; or that what we currently
happen-to want-to do will also (miraculously!) provide exactly the answers we
most need.

This is significant because we believe genius to be group
selected. Modern man seemingly cannot any longer believe that human group
cohesion is vital for continued existence and prospering – we see ourselves as
in essence atomistic, autonomous individuals and not as integral members of a
group. All this can be seen in the often-remarked loss of social cohesion at
the level of workplaces, neighbourhoods, clubs, hobbies, churches, schools,
colleges, crafts and professions – what is termed the decline in Civil Society
– all these groups have been weakened, subverted or even destroyed by The State
to which most people now look to provide their wants. Since civic involvement
has been shown to be positively associated with intelligence, we should not be
surprised to observe its decline.[108]

As already discussed, it is not just intelligence which is
declining but also other adaptations such as the General Factor of Personality:
so we are on average less pro-social, more anti-social and asocial. And
fertility is inversely associated with education, as well as with intelligence
– expanding education to include ever wider sectors of the population for ever
longer periods of life has therefore (independently) imposed further damage on
the fertility of the most intelligent on top of long term intelligence related
trends.[109]
Educational success is predicted by the GFP. So, we are becoming less Agreeable,
less Conscientious, less group-oriented in multiple ways. Indeed, mutation
accumulation would be expected to damage all types of evolved adaptation;
perhaps first and especially social adaptations, which tend to be most
sensitive to brain pathologies (psychiatric and neurological diseases show-up
in social deficits and pathologies more sensitively than in other aspects of
functionality).

In sum, under modern conditions individual selection
subverts group selection, individual selfishness subverts group selfishness – and
each person increasingly aspires to be a ‘free rider’: getting more than he
gives, living at the expense of the group as chronically unemployed,
chronically ‘sick’, long-term retired; living life as a continual party,
travelogue or holiday.

The problem of evil geniuses

Although we argue for the importance
of creativity in human affairs, and therefore of the importance of the
creatives who do the primary work of creativity, it should not be forgotten
that creativity is not only a positive human value in itself, but is also a
means to an end; and that end may be socially good or bad, creative and
cohesive, or socially subversive and destructive. As society has lost a sense
of its eternal significance, creative types – indeed geniuses – can be found in
the pursuit of things that a ‘traditional society’ would regard as ‘evil.’

Modern society has indeed become more and more ‘evil’ – which
is to say (providing here a brief definition of evil) organized in pursuit of
destruction of The Good in the traditional sense of the word – the Good being
(roughly) the transcendental values of Truth, Beauty and Virtue, underpinned by
a sense of unity and the eternal.

Thus modern leadership in many areas of life is engaged,
both passively by neglect and actively by policy, in destruction of truth,
beauty and virtue – indeed, frequently in inversion
of values; so that modern ideas of TB&V are often the opposite of
traditional: for instance, ‘subversive’ is now a term of praise. That is to
say, modern leadership embodies and enforces a morality which takes reality and
turns it upside-down – so that good becomes evil and vice versa. This Nietzschean
project of ‘the transvaluation of all values’ is far advanced, albeit
incompletely realized, and indeed it cannot ever be fully realized –
nonetheless, ‘progress’ towards its realization continues incrementally and
cumulatively. In such a context, it is unsurprising that most existent
creativity is harnessed in pursuit of this ‘evil’. After all, genius is a form
of power, and in an evil world power is likely to be used for evil purposes.

In the first place, much of this distinctively modern form
of evil by inversion is a product of highly creative persons, such as Nietzsche
himself, and lesser emulators who not only extrapolated his ideas, but
creatively enhanced them. Examples include many of the modernist artistic
subversives of early 20th century art. We have already mentioned Picasso,
Schoenburg and James Joyce – who seem to have inflicted net harm; and there are
many equally influential partial-geniuses such as Duchamp, John Cage, Ezra
Pound, William Burroughs, and Samuel Beckett – men whose considerable creative
gifts were harnessed to what was sometimes actively intended to be, and sometimes merely turned-out to be, subversive, inversional and destructive agendas.

In essence, and in opposition to the past ‘cohesion
geniuses’ of religion, philosophy, literature, music, and art that we mentioned
earlier; modern ‘evil geniuses’ have used their creativity to undermine rather
than strengthen social cohesion; to argue or demonstrate that there is no such
thing as truth, or that the false is true; to assert that life has no meaning,
to assert that forms of immorality should be praised as virtuous, and to reject
beauty in favour of originality or even to try to promote ugliness as beauty.

In other words, they used their genius to reverse the values
of the past and promote a dark, nihilistic and despairing Void of a life.

Secondly, due to the fact of creativity being part of the
personality type of ‘Psychoticism’ – creatives may tend to be more-than-usually
vulnerable to the consequences of impulsivity and less restrained by social
ethics: they are lone wolves with a potentially predatory attitude which is relatively
easily corrupted by short-term and selfish incentives, as we have seen of Jung.

Most often this can be seen in sexual and monetary
exploitativeness, shirking, lying, cheating, seducing and sponging of the
stereotypical ‘Bohemian’ lifestyle; that once defined became widely emulated (for
instance by the Beats of the 1950s, or the Hippies of the sixties) – with
predictably self-destructive effect; for instance in the lifestyles,
anti-morality and premature deaths of writers such as Arthur Rimbaud
(1854-1891),[110]
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)[111], Jack
Kerouac (1922-1969) and the numerous talented casualties of the rock and pop
music scene.[112]

Thirdly, creatives – who might in principle exercise their
creativity on anything – will find, but may not notice, that they have
themselves been pointed-at traditional institutions and values; in a context
where creativity is akin to subversion, where successful destruction of
approved targets is applauded, and accorded high status and material support.
For instance, in the post-1945 era and increasingly, positive depictions of
extramarital or unconventional sex, drug-taking and criminality were given
publicity and elite status; while mockery or subversion of Christian, ‘Bourgeois’
or Middle Class values was similarly applauded.

In sum, modern creatives are highly likely to be amateur or
professional, intentional or accidental destroyers of the Good – in their net
effect if not wholly. This is one of the horrors of our uniquely nihilistic
world.

Humans have always failed to attain The Good due to our own
weaknesses and bad motivation – but we are now in the situation where it is
normal (also legally and officially encouraged and rewarded) actively to attack
The Good, by many means and on many fronts – so that both creative ability and
hard-working conscientiousness do not merely fail to reach their promise and
their ideals – but are harnessed to work against The Good.

In sum, most modern creatives inflict either more, or less,
harmful outcomes overall; and the more effective their creativity, the greater
the harm they inflict.

Chapter Fifteen

What to do

Throughout this book, we seem to
have evolved such a distinctive perspective on the nature and effect of Genius,
and proposed so many new and unfamiliar ideas, that we can hardly suppose that
anyone else would be likely to hold exactly identical views. Most people will
therefore need to regard this book as a set of stimuli for further thought and
appraisal (or, a collection of what Marshall McLuhan used to call ‘probes’).

In the end we harbour some ambivalence about the place of
genius in the modern world. In a rotten and corrupt society, genius is probably
more likely to lead to harm than good, for the same reason that any machine
will usually do more harm than good when put into the hands of a wicked or
stupid person.

But on the other hand, the work of genius is the only
realistic hope of Western Man escaping a catastrophic outcome in a society far
advanced on the road to ruin; because only the genius can make the qualitative
creative leap to discover paths and options invisible to the normal man.

This may be a matter of creating new methods, but perhaps
what modern Man most needs is not better means to an end; but a restored sense
of the meaning, purpose, reality and community of life. What we lack most of
all is motivation – and if a modern genius, or group of geniuses, could somehow
create a new basis for motivation – then this would perhaps do more than
anything else to improve the prospects of a better future.

1.The modern world has been necessarily
based on the work of a concentration of European geniuses from the Middle Ages
and into the middle twentieth century; but genius has been disappearing rapidly
over the past century, and appears to be extinct in several domains. There
exists a state of Genius Famine.

2.This situation has been partly caused,
and partly exacerbated by the (seemingly irrational, but sociologically
explicable) fact that the modern world has become (and is becoming more)
hostile to the Endogenous personality who is the potential basis for genius,
and even to the work of actual geniuses; so that the relatively few geniuses who
emerge are nowadays usually kept from having any chance of significant influence.

3.On the one hand there is a ‘famine’ of
genius – which afflicts science, technology, the arts, politics, philosophy,
law... pretty much everything; with very few people of even potential or
partial genius now working within these fields. Yet, on the other hand, within
these fields, among professionals and experts, there is near-zero awareness,
and indeed vehement denial of the blatantly obvious, rapid, and near total
decline in genius.

4.Obscuration of the true state of things
has been achieved by two opposite (and contradictory) strategies – denying that
there is such a thing as real genius, and re-labelling non-creative fake, novelty-cobblers
as real geniuses – using mechanisms such as awarding them ‘genius’ prizes or by
redefining merely fashionable novelties as examples of genuine creative
excellence.

5.Modern people are of considerably lower
average and peak ‘general intelligence’ than in the past – so such geniuses as
emerge will generally be figures of lesser scope and creative impact than in
the past. And insofar as the generation upon generation decline of genius is
due to an accumulation of deleterious genetic mutations (caused by the
relaxation of natural selection, especially via child mortality) then this
would also be expected to damage the evolved and adaptive personality complex
of the Endogenous personality.

6.So future geniuses will be lesser
figures than in the past: less able, less inner-directed and inner-motivated,
with less effective inner-evaluations, and demonstrating less independence and
commitment in their creativity.

7.However, even a ‘local genius’, a minor
figure by world-historical standards, still provides the possibility of a genuinely creative answer to real problems. No
geniuses – no such possibilities.

So, what can we do about all this? How can we improve the
situation with respect to geniuses?

Probably there is not much we can do as individuals – indeed,
probably the problem of the decline of genius cannot be solved, even if there were awareness and understanding of the
problem and the determined will to solve it: which there is not.

The only solutions that have been seriously proposed would,
in our view, simply not work. Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911) highlighted the
problem of the less intelligent outbreeding the more intelligent in Victorian
England in his 1869 book Hereditary
Genius.[113]Later, he argued that this could be
solved by a programme of eugenics which would financially incentivise the more
intelligent to have the most children combined with inculcating people with a
kind of latter-day religiosity which emphasized the importance of improving the
‘human stock.’[114]
Others, such as Richard Lynn in his book Eugenics:
A Reassessment[115]have defended Galton but provided more
detail, for example advocating licensing to have children with the permitted
number dictated by the couple’s intelligence level.

However, even leaving aside religious prohibitions; it seems
to us that there are a number of serious practical problems with these views.
Limiting the fertility of the majority of the population in this way could only
be achieved in a stringent dictatorship based around, as Galton suggested, some
form of ‘secular religion’ of eugenics. This would entail a society of
conformity and coercion, which could potentially be highly problematic for
generating new ideas or correcting wrong ideas. It is quite possible that such
policies would result in protest, rebellion and war, potentially worsening
living conditions. Indeed, the toughest problem, and the greatest controversy,
would probably come from trying to make the modern secular elites have (on
average) above-replacement numbers of children, since all over the world the
fertility of those of highest intelligence and most education has fallen very
low as soon as contraception has become available.

Moreover, as we have shown, dysgenics on intelligence is
caused not just by dysgenic breeding but also, and probably mainly, by mutation
accumulation. Accordingly, the only way, if we follow Galton, to reverse
dysgenics would be (at minimum) the monstrous policy of allowing to die, to
sterilize, or (most effectively) inflict death upon, about half of the children
born in each generation.

In other words, effective eugenics would entail Man
artificially restoring the pre-modern harshness of natural selection; and
thereby reversing what could regarded the single greatest triumph of the
Industrial Revolution (which, arguably, has been the near elimination from
modern human experience of what used to be the almost universal tragedy of
parents suffering the premature death of several or most of their children).

So in practice we would not be likely to do more than merely
somewhat ameliorate the genius famine.

On the whole it seems that we should simply do our best to
find, support and take notice of genius: to make the most of what genius yet
remains.

The hope is that geniuses, by the fact of their genuine
creativity, would be our best, and perhaps our only, chance of finding an escape route from a trajectory which – by
conventional analysis – appears certainly to be terminal for Western
civilization.

Chapter Sixteen

In Search of
the Boy Genius

If there was a sense of real crisis,
and urgent sense of need, there might emerge a better and more wide-spread ‘search
process’ for discovering geniuses: a more effective way of unearthing more
individuals from the declining pool of potential geniuses and giving them a
better chance of coming-through to a position where they might attain the best
work of which they were capable – and then taking some notice of it.

Our description of the Endogenous personality throughout
this book would, we hope, make possible and effective this search process: for
perhaps the first time, people in search of potential geniuses would know what
it was they were looking for – the combination of inner motivation and
intuitive thinking with high intelligence.

They would also know what they were not looking for: the empathic, sociable, conscientious, popular and
balanced ‘Head Girl’ type, who, despite his or her many virtues and general
valuableness – is the opposite of a genius.

Yet, even to write that paragraph is to see that it will
likely not happen, and also perhaps why it will not happen. How could a society
which is root-and-branch hostile to exactly the kind of person who might (but
perhaps won’t) eventually become a genius then make a breakthrough of genius
impact, do anything effective to find, nurture and support geniuses? Our
society typically sees the actually-existing genius as a problem to be
eliminated, rather than the best, and perhaps only, only hope of civilizational
salvation.

And there is the paradox of organizing society to encourage
the emergence of the disorganized and disorganizing and disruptive. But if
something of the sort was actually put into effect (and this might well be a
plot for a science fiction novel, perhaps by Philip K Dick), then it could
happen by means of a program of psychological profiling and deep aptitude
testing by ‘genius masters’ rather like the process which already exists for
discovering talent in musical performance – the ways of discovering a great
concert pianist or an operatic soloist, or chess grandmasters. That is, a
multitude of individual coaches, teachers and Maestros would seek-out and
take-on promising youngsters for training; and there would be a variety of
exhibitions and competitions aimed at evaluating both achieved performance and
(more important) potential.

The Endogenous personality is, in fact, usually detectable
from around school age; in his three aspects of high intelligence, intuitive
thinking and inner motivation. Intelligence can be tested, with fair
reliability and validity; intuitive thinking may be discerned by sympathetic
observation of dreaminess and inspired insights; inner motivation will emerge
in eccentric and individualistic patterns of interests and behaviours. Armed
with this knowledge it is, in principle, quite possible to pick-out the Boy
Genius type (including a minority of girls) and help to smooth his path, and
recognize his distinctive needs and vulnerabilities.

The framework is that talent-with-potential (typically, high
technical ability in a context of the Endogenous personality) is being
discovered then developed to a point where the talent can take-over its own
development. The apprentice would need to find, and trust, a Master (who would
himself need to be an Endogenous personality). The Master would need to want to
find, and work with, the best apprentices. And the Masters would be in control
of the system (not Head Girls or
bureaucrats or committees). Because only the Masters can perceive what is going-on
– can perceive the difference between mere high ability and the potential for
creative genius. But aside from that, there is no ‘system’. No formal
requirements. No standard progression. No accreditation of any significance.

But it is equally, perhaps more, essential that the
potential genius be given the kind of personal and emotional support he needs –
or at least that he be not assaulted by what he would perceive as additional
stresses. Many (not all) geniuses are (as Ruskin perceived, and knew from
personal experience) unusually childlike and dependent; and benefit from a
higher level and greater duration of ‘looking after’ – which would typically
come from the family, but if not them then someone else trustworthy, caring, and
with the genius’s best interests at heart. The sad experience of William Sidis
– thrown by his parents, still a child-like child, into the rough turmoil of
Harvard – should be a warning in this regard.

The above may sound all too privileged for the already-privileged,
terribly elitist, very esoteric. It is a statement of the need for special
treatment for special people. And it sees talent and the potential for genius
as essentially innate. If you haven’t got it you can’t do it; and if even you
have, you probably won’t. It asks for everything that modern culture despises,
and indeed regards as immoral.

Furthermore, this is anti-democratic, anti-popular, and
aristocratic. High intellectual ability is itself very rare, but high ability
in the context of an Endogenous personality is rarer still. The process of
finding Boy Geniuses is about searching for a very few diamonds among great
heaps of (useful) coal – but with a distracting and deceptive proportion of
gaudy ‘costume jewellery’ (pretend diamonds, pseudo-geniuses) taking the form
of un-creative skill and fake creativity.

In conclusion, if modern society was concerned with its own
continuation – which very clearly it is not, being instead self-loathing and covertly
devoted to its own extinction – then something of this kind would need to occur
to locate and empower sufficient numbers of geniuses to maintain the frequent
and relevant breakthroughs necessary to enable continued growth in efficiency
and capability.

But, overall, it seems that we have to accept that Western
civilization will decline. It is, essentially, inevitable. Life will go
backwards, life will become simpler, harsher – much less comfortable, much more
serious.

Eventually, and after considerable suffering; like it or
not; perhaps enough people will come to feel part of groups, to see the
benefits of genius to the group, and to recognize the necessity of genius.

And the genius will again resume his proper role in society.

Conclusion: Seven
statements about genius

1.We need to recognize that support for
genius is social self-interest – it is a risky investment, true; but when it
pays off, a genius yields vastly more benefit than he costs.

2.The benefits yielded by genius are not
obtainable in any other way.

3.Genius is born and not made. Training
of non-geniuses will not yield more geniuses.

4.Genius can be identified, and may be
encouraged and flourish; or alternatively genius can be ignored, thwarted, suppressed
– and rendered irrelevant.

5.A genius is a difficult, eccentric,
asocial person who – despite this – exists in order to promote the good of the
group.

6.Yet, although strong in
self-motivation, self-determination and autonomy – a genius is normally a
sensitive and emotionally vulnerable person. He can be dismayed, demoralized,
corrupted or driven to despair – and his potential will then be diminished or
destroyed.

7.In future most genius will be ‘local’
(by our current standards), rather than international: a shaman rather than an
Einstein. This is the best that can realistically be hoped-for – but a local
genius is better than no genius at all.

About the
Authors

Edward Dutton is Adjunct Professor
of the Anthropology of Religion at Oulu University in Finland and an
independent scholar. He read Theology at Durham University and researched a PhD
in Religious Studies at Aberdeen University, focusing on anthropology. This was
published as Meeting Jesus at University (Ashgate,
2008). Among his other books are a study of Finnish culture, The Finnuit (Akademiai Kiado, 2009), Culture Shock and Multiculturalism (Cambridge
Scholars, 2012) and Religion and
Intelligence (Ulster Institute for Social Research, 2014). His most recent
book (with Richard Lynn) is Race and
Sport (Ulster Institute for Social Research, 2015). His research has been
reported in, and he has also written for, various national newspapers and
magazines. He can be found online at www.edwarddutton.wordpress.com

Bruce G Charlton is Visiting Professor of Theoretical
Medicine at the University of Buckingham and Reader in Evolutionary Psychiatry
at Newcastle University. Bruce has an unusually broad intellectual experience:
he graduated with honours from the Newcastle Medical School, took a doctorate
at the Medical Research Council Neuroendocrinology group, and did postgraduate
training in psychiatry and public health. He has held university lectureships
in physiology, anatomy, epidemiology, and psychology; and has a Masters degree
in English Literature from Durham. From 2003-10 Bruce solo-edited Medical
Hypotheses; a monthly international journal that published frequently
speculative, sometimes amusing, and often controversial ideas and theories
across the whole of medicine and beyond. He has published considerably more
than two hundred scientific papers and academic essays in these fields, and
contributed journalism to UK national broadsheets and weekly magazines. Bruce
is author of Thought Prison: The Fundamental
Nature of Political Correctness (2011); Not
Even Trying: The Corruption of Real Science (2012) and Addicted to Distraction: Psychological Consequences of the Modern Mass Media
(2014) all published by University of Buckingham Press. Intelligence, Personality and Genius is Bruce’s blog, where many of
the ideas for this book were developed:

[5] Rushton, J. P., Bons, T. A., &
Hur, Y.-M. (2008). The genetics and evolution of a general factor of
personality. Journal of Research in
Personality, 42, 1173–1185 or Rushton, J. P. & Irwing, P. (2008). A
General Factor of Personality from two meta-analyses of the Big Five. Personality and Individual Differences, 45:
679-683.

[22] Kox, M., Eijk, L, Zwaag, J. et al. (2014).
Voluntary activation of the sympathetic nervous system and attenuation of the
innate immune response in humans. Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 20:
7379-84.

[24]Clark, G.
(2007). A Farewell to Alms: A Brief
Economic History of the World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Clark does not explicitly mention ‘intelligence’ but this is precisely what is
entailed by the mass of evidence he cites.

[40] For a more detailed summary of
Nietzsche’s philosophy see: Leiter, B. (2015). Nietzsche’s Moral and Political
Philosophy. In Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html#n ‘Moral and Political Philosophy’ (Accessed 15August
2015).

[50]Baron-Cohen, S. (2008). Autism and Asperger Syndrome. Oxford:
Oxford University Press or Baron-Cohen, S. (2004). The Essential Difference. London: Penguin. The Endogenous
personality can be seen as both low in the female-related trait of Empathizing;
and in his non-social, or ‘abstract’, interests there is a positive and
overlapping relationship with Baron Cohen’s reciprocal and male-related trait
of Systemizing.

[65]
See: Hoffman, P. (1999). The Man Who Only
Loved Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdos and the Search for Mathematical Truth.
Hyperion Books; Kanigel, R. (1991). The
Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan. Hachette; Wallace,
A. (1986). The Prodigy: A Biography of
William Sidis, the World’s Greatest Child Prodigy. London: MacMillan.

[66] See Charlton, B. G. (2010). The
cancer of bureaucracy: How it will destroy science, medicine, education; and
eventually everything else. Medical
Hypotheses, 74: 961-965.

[69]
This is discussed in more detail in, Charlton, B.G., & Andras, P. (2005).
Medical research funding may have over-expanded and be due for collapse. QJM, 98: 53-5; Charlton, B.G. (2009) Why
are modern scientists so dull? How science selects for perseverance and
sociability at the expense of intelligence and creativity, Medical Hypotheses. 72: 237-243.

[70]
For a full biography of Newton see, Westfall, R. (1983). Never At Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

[74]
For a discussion of the tendency for geniuses to be celibate and childless see:
Simonton, D. K. (2003). Exceptional creativity across the life span: The
emergence and manifestation of creative genius. In L.V. Shavina (Ed.), The International Handbook of Innovation
(pp. 293-308). New York: Pergamon Press.

[85]
For an examination of the Industrial Revolution see, Deane, P. (1979). The First Industrial Revolution. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. For the Agricultural Revolution, see: Overton, M.
(1996). Agricultural Revolution in
England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy, 1500-1850. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

[92]
For example, they have found a secular decline in the use of difficult words,
difficult word use being a proxy for intelligence. Woodley of Menie, M.A.; Fernandes, H.; Figueredo,
A.J. & Meisenberg, G. (2015). By their words ye shall know them:
Evidence of genetic selection against general intelligence and concurrent
environmental enrichment in vocabulary usage since the mid-19th century. Frontiers
in Psychology, 6: 361. They have also noted a decline in colour
discrimination, which itself g-loaded. See, Woodley of Menie, M.A., &
Fernandes, H.B.F. (2015). Showing their true colors: Secular declines and a Jensen effect on color
acuity – more evidence for the weaker variant of Spearman's other hypothesis. Personality & Individual Differences.
In press.

[93]
Charlton, B.G. What is the main selection mechanism causing the ‘dysgenic’
decline in intelligence over the past couple of centuries? Intelligence,
Personality and Genius blog - iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk. Posted on 7
February 2013; Woodley, M. A. (2014). How fragile is our intellect? Estimating
losses in general intelligence due to both selection and mutation accumulation.
Personality and Individual Differences, 75: 80-84. These are early and
approximate attempts at quantifying intelligence losses due to mutation
accumulation.

[94]Flynn, J. R. (2012). Are We Getting Smarter? Rising IQ in the
Twenty First Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[99]Woodley, M. A. (2012). The
social and scientific temporal correlates of genotypic intelligence and the
Flynn Effect. Intelligence, 40:
189-204.

[100]Lynn R. & Vanhanen, T.
(2012). Intelligence: A Unifying Construct
for the Social Sciences. London: Ulster Institute for Social Research.

[101]
See: Charlton, B. G. (2009). Why are modern scientists so dull? How science
selects for perseverance and sociability at the expense of intelligence and
creativity. Medical Hypotheses. 72: 237-243;
and Charlton, B. G. (2009). Sex ratios in the most-selective elite US
undergraduate colleges and universities are consistent with the hypothesis that
modern educational systems increasingly select for conscientious personality
compared with intelligence. Medical
Hypotheses. 73: 127-129.

[102]
For a biography of Turing, see: Hodges, A. (2012). Alan Turing: The Enigma. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Turing, like many other geniuses, was an Endogenous personality subtype that
also fitted into the Asperger’s syndrome type of personality which has in
recent decades been rediscovered and elucidated especially in the work of Uta
Frith and Simon Baron Cohen, for example Frith, U. (1991) Autism and Asperger’s Syndrome. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press; Baron-Cohen, S. (1995) Mindblindness:
an Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind, Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT
Press/Bradford Books. The relationship between Asperger’s syndrome and the
Endogenous personality requires further elucidation than we can give it here;
but in a nutshell the two definitions overlap and individuals, including
geniuses like Newton, Turing or Godel may share features of both. But one may
be present without the other – for instance, the Endogenous personality may be
sociable, while Asperger’s is not necessarily creative.

[105]
For analysis of the degree to which Political Correctness controls these
aspects of modern Britain see Gabb,
S. (2007). Culture Revolution, Culture
War: How the Conservatives Lost England
and How to Get it Back. London: Hampden Press.

About Me

Dr Bruce G Charlton. Comments are moderated (rather strictly). Anonymous comments are seldom/ never published. If commenters include a reference or link - please explain what it is and why relevant. If my post avoids being specific, I generally will not post comments that are specific. Personal e-mails are welcome: bruce dotch arltonatou tlookdotc om...